But don’t get it twisted—there were misleading deepfakes that spread during this election. For instance, in the days before Bangladesh’s elections, deepfakes circulated online encouraging supporters of one of the country’s political parties to boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program director of the nonprofit Witness, which helps people use technology to support human rights and runs a rapid-response detection program for civil society organizations and journalists, says that his team did see an increase in cases of deepfakes this year.
“In multiple election contexts,” he says, “there have been examples of both real deceptive or confusing use of synthetic media in audio, video, and image format that have puzzled journalists or have not been possible for them to fully verify or challenge.” What this reveals, he says, is that the tools and systems currently in place to detect AI-generated media are still lagging behind the pace at which the technology is developing. In places outside the US and Western Europe, these detection tools are even less reliable.
“Fortunately, AI in deceptive ways was not used at scale in most elections or in pivotal ways, but it’s very clear that there’s a gap in the detection tools and access to them for the people who need it the most,” says Gregory. “This is not the time for complacency.”
The very existence of synthetic media at all, he says, has meant that politicians have been able to allege that real media is fake—a phenomenon known as the “liar’s dividend.” In August, Donald Trump alleged that images showing large crowds of people turning out to rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris were AI-generated. (They weren’t.) Gregory says that in an analysis of all the reports to Witness’ deepfake rapid-response force, about a third of the cases were politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event—many involving leaked conversations.
But Brennen says that the more significant use of AI this past year happened behind the scenes, in subtler, less sexy ways. “While there were fewer misleading deepfakes than many feared, there was still a lot of AI happening behind the scenes,” says Brennen. “I think we have been seeing a lot more AI writing copy for emails, writing copy for ads in some cases, or for speeches.” But because these kinds of uses for generative AI are not as consumer-facing as deepfakes, Brennen says, it’s hard to know exactly the scale at which these tools were used.
Schneier says that AI actually played a large role in the elections, including “language translation, canvassing, assisting in strategy.”
During the elections in Indonesia, a political consulting firm used a tool built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write speeches and draft campaign strategies. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used an AI translation software to translate his speeches into several of the languages spoken in India in real time. And Schneier says that these uses of AI have the potential to be good for democracy overall, allowing more people to feel included in the political process and helping small campaigns access resources that would otherwise be out of reach.
“I think we’ll see the most impact for local candidates,” he says. “Most campaigns in this country are tiny. It’s a person who’s running for a job that may not even be paid.” AI tools that could help candidates connect with voters or file paperwork, says Schneier, would be “phenomenal.”
Schneier also notes that AI candidates and spokespeople can help protect real people and opposition candidates in repressive states. Earlier this year, Belarusian dissidents in exile ran an AI candidate as a protest symbol against president Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator. Lukashenko’s government has arrested journalists and dissidents, as well as their relatives.
And for their part, generative AI companies already entered the mix with US campaigns this year. Both Microsoft and Google provided trainings to several campaigns about how to use their products during the election.
“It may not be the year of the AI election yet, because these tools are just starting,” says Schneier. “But they are starting.”