Confronting the Threat of Deepfakes in Politics

Numa Dhamani is an engineer and researcher working at the intersection of technology and society. Maggie Engler is an engineer and researcher currently working on safety for large language models at Inflection AI. On July 17, 2023, Never Back Down, a political action committee (PAC) supporting Ron DeSantis, created an ad attacking former President Donald Trump. The ad accuses Trump of targeting Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but a person familiar with the ad confirmed that Trump’s voice criticizing Reynolds was AI-generated, where the content appears to be based on a post by Trump on Truth Social. The ad ran statewide in Iowa the following day with at least a $1 million ad buy.  This is not an isolated incident — deepfakes have been circulating on the internet for several years now, and it is particularly concerning how deepfakes are, and will be, weaponized in politics. Last month, AI-generated audio recordings of politicians were released days before a tight election in Slovakia discussing election fraud. Deepfakes — AI-generated images, video, and audio are certainly a threat to democratic processes worldwide, but just how real of a threat are they?  Next year, more than 2 billion voters will head to the polls in a record-breaking number of elections around the world, including in the United States, India, and the European Union. Deepfakes are already emerging in the lead up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, from Trump himself circulating a fake image of himself kneeling in prayer on Truth Social to a…Confronting the Threat of Deepfakes in Politics