The 2024 US presidential election is shaping up to be a watershed moment in the history of democracy. With the increasing democratization of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI is already beginning to play a role in how the election is unfolding. AI applications such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Midjourney are all making it easier for everyday people to create AI-generated audio, images, and videos of political candidates. This has the potential to blur the line between what is real and what is fake, and heighten the risk of rampant disinformation.
Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert, explains how AI is rapidly advancing and how this has allowed for a “dramatic opening up of accessibility” toward generative AI tools. Republican groups have already taken advantage of this by using AI to generate attack ads against Joe Biden, and AI-generated images and videos featuring both Biden and Donald Trump are now readily available online.
The technology is developing quickly and will continue to improve, so soon anyone could use their laptop to quickly create convincing deepfake videos of political figures. Efforts such as AI-generated videos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that spread last year are evidence of this. There are already plenty of ways to generate images from text and voices from an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs.
Companies such as Runway, Google, and Meta are actively working on text-to-video generative AI tools, and Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, predicts that within a year convincing deepfakes of political figures will be readily accessible. As such, it is crucial to brace yourself for the impact AI-generated content could have on the 2024 presidential election, and the overall state of democracy in the US.
Runway is a company dedicated to providing a platform that leverages AI to enable creative enterprises. Their focus on building and deploying tools that allow individuals to train, design, build and deploy AI models makes it easier and more efficient for them to complete these tasks. Their aim is to remove the need for deep technical skills and help people harness the powers of AI in order to content and generate products quickly and efficiently.
Henry Ajder is an independent AI expert who has been involved in AI research for over 20 years. He has experience working with research institutions and industy-leading companies on projects related to AI. His expertise in the field has helped him become a sought-after AI consultant and thought-leader, and he currently travels around the world sharing insights about AI and its impact on society.
