Around this time last year, you probably read dozens of dire warnings about generative artificial intelligence’s impact on 2024’s bumper crop of global elections.
Deepfakes would supercharge political disinformation, leaving muddled voters unable to tell fact from fiction in a sea of realistic, personalised lies, the story went. Leaders from Sadiq Khan to the Pope spoke out against them. A World Economic Forum survey of experts ranked AI disinformation as the second-most pressing risk of 2024.
Sure enough, dozens of examples were widely reported. Joe Biden’s “voice” on robocalls urged primary voters to stay home; AI-generated videos of non-existent members of Marine Le Pen’s family making racist jokes were viewed millions of times on TikTok while a fake audio clip of Sir Keir Starmer swearing at a staffer went viral on X.