This year could go down in history as a time of great social change. Elections are being held in seven of the ten most populous countries in the world, allowing nearly half of humanity to vote. This includes the United States.
In less than two months, The US presidential election will be held – November 5, 2024. Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris will face each other. She replaced Joe Biden after he withdrew from the race.
Both candidates are currently campaigning, trying to win over undecided voters and solidify their position among their base. While their campaigns retain some of their traditional forms, new methods are also emerging.
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump has discovered what artificial intelligence is capable of. On his social media site Truth Social, which he founded after his Twitter account was blocked, published a series of generated images.
Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam
Donald Trump has falsely accused his political rival Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to artificially inflate the audience at her events, and later released a photo of her alleged event that was generated this way.
The AI-generated image purports to show Democratic candidate Harris from behind, with crowds of people in Chicago standing in front of her. The entire photo is tinted red, complementing the color a huge flag of the Soviet Union.
pic.twitter.com/H0ExcNXBdl
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2024
A day later, he posted screenshots of X (Twitter) posts. Only one of the images is a real photo, the rest were generated by artificial intelligence. They show young women wearing T-shirts that say “Swifties For Trump.”
However, one picture is different from the others. It shows a familiar Singer Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam, which is the personification of the United States of America. This character was used during World War II with the text: "I want you in the US Army".
However, the alleged photo of singer Swift is accompanied by the text "Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump"Presidential candidate Trump used a generated likeness of a famous person to promote his candidacy, although she never supported him.
The Unteachable Elon Musk
Former President Donald Trump has been repeatedly exposed for lying or misleading, including a post by singer Swift that was supposed to support him. However, that didn't happen, and she has even supported his opponent in the past, CNN reports.
Earlier this year, 20 leading tech companies signed an agreement to reduce the risk of political disinformation using artificial intelligence, including Elon Musk's social media platform X.
However, his other company, xAI, is hard at work developing the Grok model, which differs from other models in that it allows users to generate things that other AI models would refuse to generate. This also applies to images, recently..
Users with a premium account on X have access to Grok's artificial intelligence. Source: unsplash.com/@alexbemoreAs The Guardian reports, social media platform X was flooded with deepfake images of Trump and Harris almost immediately after the launch of the new Grok model feature. It adds that the model can also generate a likeness of a famous singer, which other companies would avoid.
Singer Swift's likeness was used to create pornographic material in January. The posts were seen by more than 45 million users and hung on the platform for hours before being taken down. From that moment on, talk of regulation began.
Insufficient legislation
In the US state of Tennessee, where Swift's corporate office is located, Governor Bill Lee signed the groundbreaking ELVIS Act in March. It is intended to protect artists from unauthorized imitations of their works by artificial intelligence, reports TechCrunch.
"This bill was passed with bipartisan support because everyone seems to be aware of the problems that artificial intelligence and the misuse of artificial intelligence tools can pose to the public," lawyer Noah Downs explained to TechCrunch.
However, its effectiveness is not yet known, as it has only been in effect for a short time. So far, there is no precedent, how it could be used. The law also targets artificial intelligence-generated audio recordings that imitate singers' voices.
The Verge reports that 20 states have regulations governing the use of fake AI-generated images in elections. Their application in this case is unlikely to be possible because It's not enough that it's a deepfakeif its content is not credible.