15 November 2023
Argentina's runoff presidential election on Sunday may be the “first A.I. election” according to The New York Times.
Campaigns for both Sergio Massa and Javier Milei have used AI to create campaign posters, videos and audio of their own candidate as well as their opponent.
According to the The New York Times: “Much of the content has been clearly fake. But a few creations have toed the line of disinformation.” This includes a video produced by the Massa campaign showing Milei explaining how a market for human organs might work, and images from both campaigns showing the candidates as characters from movies or as popular Argentine heroes.
More concerning is the confusion created by the proliferation of deepfake images, with many Argentines unsure of what is real and what is fake. The New York Times reports that a video showing Massa exhausted after a rally was denounced by his supporters as fake, only for the campaign to confirm that it was in fact real.
All AI-generated content from the official campaigns has been labelled as such, but content created by unofficial supporters or critics has not been subject to such stringent transparency. Meta has reportedly stated that it will require paid political ads to disclose if AI has been used to generate content in future, but not unpaid posts on its platforms.
Global regulation of the use of AI in political ads may soon be on the way. But how regulators will be able to control the spread of deepfake content from unofficial and unpaid sources during campaigns will be a challenge. And the problem is only likely to grow as AI becomes cheaper and more readily-available, or “democratised” as it is (perhaps erroneously) being called...