This story was originally published in Vanity Fair.
For a substantial percentage of Americans, 2020 was the year that election outcomes entered the realm of relativity. Donald Trump lost, but he and his supporters still declared victory. This year’s election, it seems, will be marked by yet another novel distortion of reality. Thanks to advances in AI, malicious actors can now create fraudulent messages from political leaders within minutes and reject authentic recordings of their own words as fakes.
An example of the former scenario played out this week ahead of New Hampshire’s Democratic primary: On Sunday, residents of the state began receiving robocalls from an AI-generated imitation of Joe Biden telling voters to skip the Tuesday primary. The calls, which are being investigated by the New Hampshire Justice Department, mark the first time that AI has been used in a major voter-suppression campaign, according to The Washington Post. The Biden campaign has said it is “actively discussing additional actions to take immediately,” and one Democratic congressman, Joseph Morelle from New York, has urged the Justice Department to investigate the matter. “This clear bid to interfere in the New Hampshire primary demands a thorough investigation,” he wrote in a letter to the DOJ, calling on federal officials to “deter further AI-based attacks that will disrupt American democracy and disenfranchise American voters.”
Meanwhile, Trump has seized upon public concerns over AI to deny the legitimacy of a recent Lincoln Project advertisement. The spot compiled footage of various Trump gaffes—namely his erroneous attempt to pronounce the word anonymous and his failure to correctly identify which California town he was visiting back in 2018. The incidents, although all real and easily verifiable, were nonetheless rejected by Trump as fabrications. “The perverts and losers at the failed and once disbanded Lincoln Project, and others, are using A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) in their Fake television commercials in order to make me look as bad and pathetic as Crooked Joe Biden, not an easy thing to do,” he wrote on his social media platform last month. “FoxNews shouldn’t run these ads.”
Like Biden, Trump, too, has been the victim of an AI-generated smear. Actor Mark Ruffalo apologized earlier this month after sharing fake photos on X, formerly known as Twitter, that purported to show Trump mingling with teenage girls on a plane owned by Jeffrey Epstein. “Gross. #MAGA wants to paint everyone on those flights as pedophiles except the one guy who smiles in a group of young girls all headed to Esptein’s ‘Fantasy Island’ with him,” Ruffalo captioned the since-deleted post. In turn, Trump said that AI “will be a big and very dangerous problem in the future” and added, “Strong laws ought to be developed against A.I.”
Generative AI technology has progressed to the point where near-lifelike renderings of anyone—saying or doing almost anything—can be produced with relative ease if a model is fed enough photos, video footage, and audio recordings. It’s a massive leap from where the technology was just a couple of years ago, when the role of AI in politics was largely comedic.
Perhaps fearing regulatory threats to the industry, OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence company, has banned a developer from using its technology on a chatbot rendering of Dean Phillips, the Democratic congressman challenging Biden in a long-shot presidential bid. The voice bot—fueled by Phillips’s past speeches and media appearances—was created by a pro-Phillips super PAC as a splashy means for voters to get to know the candidate. However, the so-called Dean.Bot proved a violation of OpenAI’s usage policies and has since been shuttered. “We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent,” OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held told the Post. Visitors to the bot’s website are now greeted with the message, “Apologies, DeanBot is away campaigning right now.”
