The 2024 presidential election may feature two highly recognizable candidates, but it’s a new, emerging technology — artificial intelligence — that could have a major impact on the information, or misinformation, voters consume.
A majority of Americans, 57%, think fake news is a problem in this year’s presidential election, according to a poll conducted earlier this year by Ipsos and Project Liberty. Another 32% see it as a problem.
Half of American adults said they personally heard election news in the past year that they thought was fake or fabricated.
Earlier this year, Scripps News traveled to Mesa, Arizona, to attend a training hosted by Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. There, Fontes trained participants just as he trains election workers to spot misinformation and disinformation that could have a major impact on the upcoming election.
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Fontes even cast himself in a very convincing, yet fake, video created using artificial intelligence to prove his point.
Rachael Dean Wilson of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former aide to Sen. John McCain has been monitoring the disinformation landscape. She believes AI has the potential to fuel election disinformation in ways voters can’t easily detect.
“I think it has the potential overall to amplify everything,” Wilson said. “So we’re amplifying the ability to create fake audio and fake video that looks real, and it’s hard to say whether that’s true or not. And it certainly can, if it’s delivered at the right time or with the right message, influence the election, influence the vote, depending on how it’s deployed.”
This election cycle has already seen one high-profile audio deepfake. In January, some New Hampshire residents received a fake robocall from President Joe Biden, telling them not to participate in the state’s primary, just days before voters were set to go to the polls.
That fake audio was traced to Louisiana, but an even bigger threat may come from outside.
“So we think about the big three: Russia, China, Iran,” Wilson said when asked about the foreign actors most likely to target U.S. elections. “The one that’s really kind of ahead of the rest of the crowd in the information space in particular is Russia. They’ve just been doing it for so long and have really perfected some of these tools and tactics that they use to target Americans and other democracies around the world.”
Their overarching goal, Wilson said, “will be to divide and create chaos. And the reason is that it is in Russia’s interest to divide Americans and make it look like our democracy is incredibly chaotic.”
Wilson advises voters to remain vigilant in the run-up to the general election about misinformation and disinformation, especially when consuming information online.
“I would also say that you have to take it a step further and say that you have to take ownership of your information diet,” Wilson added. “I think a lot of people, you know, look at what we eat, we exercise, we take care of all of those things. But this is what we consume, and it affects how we think and how we act.”