How Big a Role Will Artificial Intelligence Play in the 2024 Elections?
The good, the bad, and the ugly of election with a cyber-edge!
It is a little less than a year and a half until the next presidential election, and the 2024 season is shaping up to be quite the battle.
As we have been following the rise of chatbots and the expanding uses of artificial intelligence, now might be a good time to project to see how this new resource might be used in the upcoming campaigns. Once the election results have been tallied and the Legal Insurrection team has recovered from Election Night, we can assess the accuracy of the predictions.
In looking ahead, many “experts” are already worried about the “deep fakes” penetrating social media.
While such synthetic media has been around for several years, it’s been turbocharged over the past year by of a slew of new “generative AI” tools such as Midjourney that make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes, according to Reuters interviews with about two dozen specialists in fields including AI, online misinformation and political activism.
“It’s going to be very difficult for voters to distinguish the real from the fake. And you could just imagine how either Trump supporters or Biden supporters could use this technology to make the opponent look bad,” said Darrell West, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation.
“There could be things that drop right before the election that nobody has a chance to take down.”
The good news is that those who regularly use social media know this issue. As a result, there may be an increased effort to double- and triple-check the source…which would be a pleasant change from how our media has recently operated.
This deepfake is the sort of thing @ericschmidt and I warned about as the "first threat" in our article in @TheAtlantic: https://t.co/1HM4xM2t6y
This one is clearly a joke, but soon there could be thousands, posing as real, in time for the election. We must set rules now. https://t.co/xaVF5PquH9
— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) May 27, 2023
The impact may be most felt in the smaller races during the 2024 cycle. Chatbots and AI resources can be utilized inexpensively to create compelling content, impactful messaging, and focus on issues of importance to local or regional voters.
AI’s real impact on campaigning will be “behind the scenes,” said Tom Newhouse, vice president of digital marketing at Converge Media, a Republican advertising and consulting firm. “It’s going to be improving fundraising capabilities by better targeting, whether that is location targeting, income, hobbies or habits, providing campaigns with up-to-date voter data, more personalized advertising, [or] messages.”
“There are many small campaigns that I think can potentially leverage the tools to [not just] save time, but to create content that may not have been possible otherwise,” said Larry Huynh, a partner at Trilogy Interactive, a Democratic digital marketing firm.
It is interesting to note that artificial intelligence has already been utilized in a few elections. New Zealand’s National Party has admitted using AI to generate people in their attack advertisements.
The efforts were imperfect.
The ads included images of a group of robbers storming a jewellery store, two nurses of Pacific island descent, and an apparent crime victim gazing out of a window. One ad even appeared to show the cast of the Fast and Furious franchise.
The images, showing a woman with enormous eyes, two nurses with oddly plasticine skin and thieves wearing balaclavas with openings that would not match up to human features, quickly raised suspicions.
Questioned by Newshub on whether the images had been created by AI, party leader Christopher Luxon initially said “I don’t know about the topic in the sense of I am not sure. You are making an accusation that we are using it, I am not sure that we are. I will need to talk to our team.”
But the party later confirmed the nurses, crime victims and robbers were the work of a computer program. “Yes we have used AI to create some stock images,” a National party spokesperson told Newshub, calling it “an innovative way to drive our social media,” and adding that the party was “committed to using it responsibly”.
A few weeks ago, the Republican National Committee offered an AI-created ad targeting Biden.
The Republican National Committee responded to President Biden’s re-election announcement Tuesday with an AI-generated video depicting a dystopian version of the future if he is re-elected.
The video features AI-created images appearing to show Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrating at an Election Day party, followed by a series of imagined reports about international and domestic crises that the ad suggests would follow a Biden victory in 2024.
I suspect the ad, which is no different than any other attack ad in terms of targeting, persuaded many voters one way or the other. So, I think the hysteria is likely over-stated.
Interestingly, one party in Denmark is developing policies based on AI input.
Launched in May, Det Syntetiske Parti (The Synthetic Party), which aims to be “the last new party in Denmark”, is breaking ground by deriving its policies entirely using AI.
Designed and programmed by the artistic collective Computer Lars in partnership with the tech nonprofit MindFuture Foundation, the algorithmic party hopes to stand in the country’s next general election in June 2023, with the intention of targeting the 20 percent of Danes that did not vote in the previous 2019 election.
For Asker Bryld Staunaes, one of the founding members of the Computer Lars collective, The Synthetic Party represents “the political vision of the common person”.
I predict that 2024 will contain all the good, the bad, and the ugly of a typical presidential cycle…but with a cyber edge.
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Comments
From the presumed Democrat ticket, Artificial Intelligence would be the best that can be expected.
Well, we have an artificial president, artifical vice president, and an artifical cabinet. Half of congress is artificial as are half our courts.
Well, there’s no actual intelligence involved in the likely Democrat ticket, so AI is all they got. (And it turns out ChatGPT learned everything it knows from Biden, so….)
The week of the election ignore all media.
That won’t be enough to counteract the democrats’ months long ballot harvest.
Exactly. In some States they have election month in others they have well more than a month. In those States it is important to build the momentum and flow of the campaign to align with the early voting period not the traditional election day peak.
That and competing for mail in ballots and prior to election season using every possible tool/lever to pry open the voter registration rolls and eliminate the ineligible. After the election is too late to complain about potential ineligible voters, bad ballots. There simply isn’t a good mechanism to undo counted ballots even if know that a portion are ineligible. Proactive may work, reactive will not as we have seen time after time.
AI has been a huge factor in politics since the beginning of time.
Ha, I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden insists that presidential debates be done remotely and then his campaign uses an AI bot to simulate him. Shouldn’t be hard; just program it to say “Come on man!” a lot, and to tell a few meandering stories every ten minutes or so.
When deeply stupid people are permitted to vote campaigns degenerate to this level. All this ado about appealing to morons. The republic is moribund. All is theater now. Get used to it.
Now I’m going to have “Limelight” by Rush stuck in my head all day long 🙂
There is hope for us all. I was visiting home while my mother was sick, and got well more than an earful of MSNBC. My father, a yellow-dog Democrat all his life, had the TV on because reading the newspaper had become so difficult, he only got it on the weekends.
I let it slide. I wasn’t there to get into a confrontation over it.
He finally said, “You can shut that off. Everything they say is a lie.”
If my frail, half-blind father can see it, others can, as well.
Don’t underestimate the force of the woke propaganda children are subjected to at every level of education, and reinforced by all manner of entertainment. I find it childish and insulting to the intelligence but to the indoctrinated cult it is unquestionable truth.
Another great point. Which demonstrates exactly why the ‘culture war’ things are worth fighting against. Ignoring those issues in the schools, University and other institutions has gotten us to where we are; fighting a rearguard action.
Yes, Progressivism is a religion.
Given AI’s propensity to just make sh#t up and it’s woke bent. I suspect it will be used to engineer yet another, shall we say, creative manipulation of the electorate.
AI will just be another tool for the Zuckerbuck and propaganda machine crowd. Seems a waste to me when most of the voting public sees a family in front of a flag spouting what they want to hear and that’s the end of the vetting process. Doesn’t matter is all for the Gulibly to enjoy when not a bit is what the candidates believe.
An implanted AI in the place where Biden’s frotal cortex used to be controls his daily functions. He does not yet have Total Recall, but he does have an implanted memory of a fantastical adventure on Mars. Balance is robotic and awkward, etc. etc.
Given that 2/3 of the country thinks Biden is not up to the job and it seems that he really has to be kept in the basement, my thought is that we will see an AI-generated vigorous Biden out and about in many TV ads.
Biden will not be the candidate if his handlers allow him near a window.
“It’s going to be very difficult for voters to distinguish the real from the fake. And you could just imagine how either Trump supporters or Biden supporters could use this technology to make the opponent look bad.”
Yeah, in the old days you had to actually bribe or threaten corrupt intelligence officials to lie about a laptop being Russian propaganda or get the entire mainstream media to run with your lies about Russian influence…
Everyone is talking about deepfakes, and yes AI is good for that. But fakes can be analyzed and shown to be fake, and everybody is going to be putting fake images of all sorts out there. I am more concerned about the real superpower of AI – its ability to communicate with thousands of people simultaneously under different assumed personalities. Such a power is fantastic for organizing vast conspiracies without little chance of discovery. Look at what Hillary accomplished without the benefit of AI. Just think of what the Democrats could accomplish if they use an AI to run a big conspiracy.
Don’t even trust your lieing eyes or ears – manipulating supposed “recordings” has been entirely too easy for a long time now. And a lie will circle the globe before the truth has time to get out of bed.
And at the FBI, they don’t even USE recordings. They write down what they damn well please in longhand only, then pretend it resembles what you actually said to them.
This morning on TV they were discussing this very issue and had an AI version of a DeSantis ad that looked real. Of course, if you know the person and their views, you will see right through it. It is the Headline news crowd that will not know it is fake and will respond to it as if it were real. That is where the damage to the candidates will come from. The casual voter or last-minute voter who hasn’t followed the candidates is very vulnerable to this.
With all due respect, is it not a more pertinent question to ask ‘What role will actual votes legally cast by living US citizens in accordance with their actual choices play in what will be called ‘elections’ in 2024 if such occur?” The massive and deliberately left uncorrected fraud in the last several elections does not argue for that great a role for real votes in the future.
Subotai Bahadur
‘What role will actual votes legally cast by living US citizens in accordance with their actual choices play in what will be called ‘elections’ in 2024 if such occur?”
Answer: “not much.”
I’m alarmed by how AI is already being used to distort and twist our ability to discern the differences between events real and unreal.
The RON! video is very disturbing. The video itself is a piece of propaganda – disguised as sardonic warning – warning us about the possibilities of fake video, images, audio etc. It still smears Desantis. Of course youtube will allow and promote [trend] the fakes smearing republican/right wing fakes while instantly deleting any and all fakes smearing democrat politicians.
The Danish AI DET SYNTETISKE PARTI is kaput. it was a joke made global by lazy journalists looking for easy copy work.
https://detsyntetiskeparti-wordpress-com.translate.goog/formal/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Zip, zero and none, it’s all going to be Fraud that gets the Deep State Puppet I the White House
Don Jr. retweeted the DeSantis deep fake video. He’d not be retweeting it if it featured his father.
For the last few weeks Trump is saying DeSantis rates no higher than small office manager.
The DFV shows a feckless DeSantis (middle management) reviled and mocked by the office entire. We then jump to DeSantis in his dark, tiny, single windowed office. He doesn’t even rate a small corner office suite. A crappy office for a crappy manager. That bit is subtle; subordinate officer.
Real Trump Executives own airy, well lit, spacious, multi-windowed, penthouse suites furnished with large, commanding desk. Rather than mock, the employees tremble.
Deep fake video meets fake dossier. The circle is squared.
Tempted to make the old “worry more about Genuine Stupidity” joke here.
But — a huuge number of people are just too uninformed (misinformed? disinformed?) and/or ignorant to be voting. It’s sick.
I love the top photo.
Here they are before makeup.
AI will play as much role as necessary to bring about Dem victories.