Deepfakes Designed To Mislead Voters

Uploaded on 2024-01-19 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, GOVERNMENT-National, GOVERNMENT-Local, FREE TO VIEW

Powerful new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools will allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election. Now,over 50 countries, representing more than half of the global population, are set to hold elections. At the same time, new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence have proliferated and could be used to shape political narratives.

Recent research has found a very extensive amount of public fears about the integrity of UK elections and the vulnerability of readers/viewers of false statements and misinformation on social media.

Britain is only months away from a General Election, but now new research suggests worrying levels of public mistrust in the process and polling data suggesting a significant section of the population believe our elections are “manipulated or rigged”.

There is also evidence from a study into social media suggesting many British voters could be vulnerable to misinformation campaigns, such as the Russian meddling in the 2016 US Election that saw Donald Trump elected to the White House.

Russian military intelligence hacked into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and released tens of thousands of private communications in a sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 US Election, according to an indictment announced days before President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the UK debates over the unfairness of our first-past-the-post system have run for decades. But the evidence from the research project run by the consultancy Thinks Insight suggests many voters now believe there are more underhand injustices in our democratic process. It reveals a high potential vulnerability amongst voters to AI-produced “Deepfakes” on social media.

The study includes startling results from a poll of British adults which found that nearly a third (30%) thought that UK elections are more likely to be “manipulated” or “rigged” than “free and fair”.

It also found that 60% of voters are more inclined to agree that “the official version of events often hides the truth” rather than it being “usually accurate”.

More than a third (38%) were more in agreement with the idea that it’s “acceptable to question the validity of the results of elections in the UK” than they were with the idea that “it’s important that we all respect the results of elections in the UK”.

Another survey of a nationally representative sample by a reputable polling company produced similar results, where participants was shown posts containing misinformation on a mock-up of a social media site, which a significant proportion were prepared to promote by interacting with them.

A post telling voters to bring pens to polling stations (to avoid their pencilled vote being rubbed out and changed) was “boosted” by more than a third (35 per cent), as was the idea that tellers outside polling stations were checking who wasn’t voting so they could send in fake voters (34%).

There was even higher interaction with broader misinformation such as a false statistic about child asylum seekers (40%), and misinformation on immigrant hotels (41%).

This study, which included 1,650 participants in all, also looked at the effectiveness of potential remedies to the misinformation. Another subgroup of 550 participants was shown content warnings on some posts, saying to be careful before sharing because there had been a recent increase in posts with “unverified information” on that topic. Alarmingly, the experiment showed these had no meaningful effect on slowing the spread of misinformation.

The recently enacted British Online Safety legislation has already made it a criminal offence to exchange deepfake pornographic material and it remains to be seen if the law can be extended to political camaign material.

techUK: iNews: Context: OUP: APNews: THinksInsight: Image: Hendra Su

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