Artificial intelligence and elections

As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more mainstream, there is growing concern about how this will influence elections. Potential targets of AI include election processes, election offices, election officials and election vendors.

Types of AI Tactics
Generative AI capabilities allow creation of misleading content. Examples of this include text-to-video, deepfake videos, text-to-image, AI-altered image, text-to-speech, voice cloning, and text-to-text. In the context of the election, a deepfake video of a presidential candidate may propagate information that the candidate does not endorse. Chatbots could spread misinformation related to election locations, times or voting methods. In contrast to malicious actors in the past, these techniques today require little technical skill and can spread rapidly.

AI and the US Presidential 2024 Election
Regulation of AI with regard to elections is an issue and is unlikely to see a resolution for most of the 2024 election season. The campaign for the 2024 Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has used deepfake videos of political opponents in campaign ads and fake images showing Trump with black supporters. Joe Biden's campaign has prepared a task force to respond to AI images and videos.

Robocall
A Democratic consultant working for Dean Phillips has also admitted to using AI to generate a robocall which used Joe Biden's voice to discourage voter participation.

State Regulation
States have attempted regulation of AI use in elections and campaigns with varying degrees of success.

Tech Company Regulation
Midjourney, an AI image-generator, has started blocking users from creating fake images of the 2024 US Presidential candidates. Research from The Center for Countering Digital Hate found that image generators such as Midjourney, ChatGPT Plus, DreamStudio and Microsoft's Image Creator create images that constitute election disinformation in 41% of the test text prompts they tried.