How Can Artificial Intelligence Affect Elections

March 31, 2023 was an important day when a US grand jury framed charges against former President Donald Trump. During this time, a video went viral in which President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were seen celebrating in the White House.

A close look at the video shows that Kamala Harris has six fingers in her hands and the upper part of her hand is missing.

Actually, both the President and the Vice President were not present in the White House that day. But these fake pictures of them were sent to millions of people.

This video is promotional material such as videos, photos and articles created with Artificial Intelligence i.e. ‘AI’, which will be delivered to millions of voters in the next presidential election, that too at a fast speed. This content will be prepared and sent to small groups of voters according to their profile.

The Generative Artificial Intelligence Chat-GPT that created it was launched in November last year and is now available to the general public.

Chat-GPT can write articles and blogs by collecting all the information from the internet, it can even write songs and poems.

In such a situation, it will be difficult for the voters to find out whether the promotional material they have received is real or fake.

This week we will try to find out whether the next President of America will be decided by Artificial Intelligence?

Table of Contents

Digital Politics

To understand the use of Artificial Intelligence in electoral politics, we talked to Betsy Hoover, who is the co-founder of Higher Grounds Lab.

This company invests in technology used in election campaigns. Betsy Hoover entered politics in 2007 as an organizer in the election campaign of former President Barack Obama.

Betsy Hoover says, “At that time Obama was the first candidate who made full use of digital technology for public contact and mass organization in the election campaign. At that time we had a shortage of people and money. The solution to overcome this problem was the use of digital technology. We made a strategy to try it first at the state level and then at the national level.”

She says that the reason for this was not only to save money but also to reach out to people in an effective way.

Whether people are at home, in the office or anywhere else, their phones are always on. Therefore, digital medium was a good way to contact people. But was he not afraid that somewhere in this there is a lack of direct contact with the people?

Betsy Hoover admits, “There was a lot of debate on this issue at that time. We were reaching out to people through messages, emails and Facebook and we ourselves were wondering whether this method was more effective than direct contact. It is true that through this we were able to connect with more people at one time.”

In 2012, Obama was re-elected as President. But in the last ten years, the role of technology in election campaigns has changed a lot.

Through artificial intelligence technology, voters’ profiles and preferences can now be detected and candidates can change their messages and promotional material accordingly.

It is believed that an effective part of generative AI can have a big impact on the 2024 presidential elections.

This technology can create and deliver large amounts of content for election campaigns based on the profile and thinking of voters. Through this, candidates can convey their message to people in small groups.

Betsy Hoover says, “Candidates hire a large number of content writers and strategists for their election campaigns who create variations of emails or posts written for election campaigns and send them to different voters. But creating so many variations takes time and money. This work can be done very quickly and cheaply with artificial intelligence.”

But if content can be created easily and cheaply with the help of technology, then there is also a risk in it. That is, wrong people can use it to harm a candidate or even tarnish his image.

Artificial Intelligence

The BBC spoke to Hany Farid, a professor of communication science at the University of California, Berkeley, about the potential misuse of artificial intelligence and gives a shocking example of misuse of AI.

He says, “Have you seen the news in which a woman received a call from her daughter. Her daughter was saying that some people had kidnapped her. The woman immediately called her husband and told him that her daughter was playing at home. The matter was that someone had sent her a message by imitating her daughter’s voice with the help of artificial intelligence. That is, someone was trying to extort money from her.”

These examples may seem to be exceptions, but it shows that AI software has now become so developed and it can imitate someone’s voice so well that it becomes difficult to recognize it.

In the last twenty years, our ability to make computers and software has increased rapidly, due to which AI software has now become quite developed. Also, people themselves have been providing a lot of their information on the internet, based on which it is not difficult to target them.

Hani Farid says, “In the last twenty years, we have been putting information like photos, videos, voice on social media at our own will.”

“Whenever you visit any website, they get a lot of your information. This is a very profitable business. Now machines recognize your face and voice, they also have information about your family members. Those who mine data on social media and other websites have an amazing amount of information about people, due to which we can be targeted and mislead.”

Social media and other websites create profiles of people with the help of available information and AI and deliver advertisements to them accordingly.

For example, if you search for information about tickets to a place, you immediately start seeing advertisements related to that place on social media.

But now with the help of generative AI, it has also become easy to create fake content using someone’s text messages, photos, videos or audio.

Hani Farid says about this, “Voice cloning has also started, such as showing a Christian priest giving a fake statement in a video and sharing the video all over the world. Generative AI can create such content. Some people are using such software over which there is no control. This is quite worrying.”

Professor Hany Farid says that such software is now easily available which can be misused. One software of generative AI is Chat-GPT, about which it is being said that it is bringing dramatic changes in the use of AI technology.

Chat-GPT can create text content, but there are other similar software available that can create video and audio content.

Hani Farid says that there is a possibility of fake content created by it being used in the presidential election campaign in the US next year.

The use of such fake content in election campaigns will not only mislead voters, it will also harm the democratic process. But while there is a danger of its misuse in elections, it also has some benefits.

Expenses of election campaign

We all know that money is as important as the organization of election campaign.

Our third expert is Martin Kuruz, who is the CEO of Sterling Data Company. This company helps candidates in America to raise funds for election campaigns.

Martin Kuruz says that in many countries, the election expenses of candidates come from public sources, but in America, they raise funds for elections from their supporters or companies.

He says, “For example, candidates of the Democratic Party raise funds for their campaign from party supporters. The party has about 17 crore supporters who can donate or are donors.”

He says, “Candidates take our help to find their addresses. They want us to prepare a list of potential donors in the shortest possible time. For this, we use AI. The software processes the profiles of all the supporters and their related information and makes a list.”

Martin Kuruz says that earlier computer engineers had to work for several days to make a list of supporters, but now this process has become very easy.

He says, “We put people’s data in our software and AI does this work in a few minutes. Now many platforms are providing deep learning facility on the Internet and people can use it for data processing.”

On one hand, this reduces the cost of contesting elections for the candidate, on the other hand, the list of people he gets is beneficial for him.

Martin Kuruz says, “In the coming time, this cost will keep decreasing and more people will be able to enter the electoral field. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to bring more equality in the electoral process and make it democratic.”

So now it remains to be seen whether this will affect the next presidential elections of America?

2024- Watershed Movement

Expert Nina Shik is the author of the well-known book Deepfake on generative artificial intelligence. She says that by the next election this technology will have advanced a lot and it will be difficult to run an election campaign without its use.

She says, “I think not only the way of campaigning but also the messages for the people will change. Generative AI can create and send personalized messages for every voter. This will enable politicians to better communicate with the public. This technology will be first used in election campaigns to create public opinion on a subject or issue.”

But Nina Shik also believes that many people can also misuse it, which was seen even before the arrival of Chat-GPT.

According to her, “During the last elections, we saw a lot of fake content. Fake videos of Donald Trump and Joe Biden appeared on social media. It is not necessary that such content comes from the rival camp, but many other people can also do this work.”

“It becomes difficult for the public to differentiate between what is real and what is fake. If a candidate is caught on camera taking a bribe, he can turn around and say that the video is fake. This way the credibility of the content will come under suspicion.”

On the other hand, since 2016, Russia has been accused of influencing the US presidential elections in a wrong way. So, has the possibility of foreign interference in these elections increased more than before due to artificial intelligence?

On this, Nina Shik says, “There is no doubt that foreign powers can use the ability to spread fake information. Since the last elections, more and more foreign powers are getting involved in such activities around the world.”

Nina Shik believes that this will challenge the democratic process but it will continue.

But the main question is whether AI can decide the next President of America?

Experts say that while AI is providing some benefits to the democratic process, it also has the power to harm it.

But this is the crop we have sown which we have to reap. Therefore, it is important that we decide what kind of society we want.

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