Dem
51
GOP
49
AI has been around since a workshop at Dartmouth in 1956, but it has only hit the mainstream in the past year. In a big way. And it is going to hit the 2024 elections in an even bigger way.
Some of it is innocuous and some is not. For example, AI is going through big data to identify potential donors and voters so they can be approached for donations and votes, respectively. People could do this work as well, but computers can now do it more efficiently and with little human labor. Campaigns are also deploying AI to extract useful clips from long videos. Again, people could do this too, so it is just a labor-saving tool.
The next step up are things like writing candidate biographies and campaign literature. One Democratic pollster said that ChatGPT wrote him a biography of a gubernatorial candidate in a few seconds that would have taken him 45 minutes.
Now what about this?
This is a video produced by the RNC in honor of Joe Biden's announcement that he is running. All the images were produced by AI software. They are not actual photos that some staffer edited in Photoshop. They are completely new and fake. Generating fake images and fake audios and fake videos is a whole new ballgame compared to merely saving staffers some time.
Here is a famous example of a deepfake video from 5 years ago and the technology has gotten much better since then. If you have a history of trusting your own eyes and ears, we suggest you watch this one all the way through:
Multiple companies, including Midjourney and OpenAI, are offering services to make complete fake photos based on a few user-supplied keywords. They are already so good that they can pass an updated version of the Turing test, a test designed by computer pioneer Alan Turing to see if a machine exhibits intelligent behavior.
What happens when an unethical campaign makes a video of their opponent saying all kinds of outrageous things that the candidate supposedly said and uses the fake video in television and online ads? How about a RNC-sponsored ad showing Joe Biden "announcing" that in his second term he will order the FBI to go out and search everyone's house for guns, confiscate them all, and fine the guns' owners $10,000 per gun found? How would this affect Republican turnout? The DNC could make an ad just as inflammatory, for example having Donald Trump "announce" that he will suspend the Constitution, cancel the 2028 election, and be president for life, but it is not their style. Let your imagination run wild here—because campaign strategists are letting theirs run wild. (V)