A vibrant democracy relies on engaged voters making informed decisions about their representatives and keeping them accountable employing reliable information and secure election infrastructure. Significant and continuous effort is needed in improving a democracy and elections are a key part of that. Democracy at a practical level means empowering the voter with a right to choose and providing multiple capabilities, including knowledge about candidates, campaign finance, voting, processing votes, and so forth.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have transformed modern society. It also impacts how elections are conducted in democracies, with mixed outcomes. For example, digital marketing campaigns have enabled candidates to connect with voters at scale and communicate remotely during COVID-19, but there remains widespread concern about the spread of election disinformation as the result of Al-enabled bots and aggressive strategies.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have produced AI tools that help political campaigns to prevail in election cycles. There have been notable early successes for campaigns using this technology, particularly in 2016 for the Trump presidential campaign and, during the Brexit referendum, the U.K. Leave Campaign. Critiques of these pioneering tools argue that they have adopted unethical practices, and that monitoring the ethical use of such tools is too complex a task, particularly when tools are the intellectual property of private corporations.

Are dead politicians coming alive?

We have seen numerous tactics to win elections. In this election climate, one of the major Indian political tactics is to use generative AI to resurrect former Indian politicians. On January 23, an icon of Indian cinema and politics, M Karunanidhi appeared before a live audience on a large projected screen, to congratulate his 82-year-old friend and fellow politician TR Baalu on the launch of his autobiographical book.

Karunanidhi passed away in the year 2018. This was the third time, in the past six months, that the iconic leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party was resurrected using artificial intelligence (AI) for such public events.

In a conversation with Al Jazeera, Senthil Nayagam, founder of Muonium, the AI media tech firm that made the deepfake Karunanidhi video, stated that there is a market opening up [for such deepfakes]…. You can attribute some statements to a particular person and that kind of gives more value to it.

Ethics and legalities

Even as policymakers evaluate instances of the types of AI communication that should be regulated, in a first-of-its-kind use, a political party used AI. To resurrect a yesteryear political stalwart to promote today’s leader.

But there lies some ethical legal questions. Amber Sinha, senior fellow for Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation stated in a conversation with Al Jazeera that the use of AI to create synthetic audio and video by a living person who has signed off on the content is one thing. It is quite another to resurrect a dead person and ascribe opinions to them. But the genie is already out of the bottle.

AI-facilitated content marketing for elections campaigns, including outbound voice calls and SMS, avatar creation, personalised media outreach, and AI-created multilingual creatives on social media is an estimated $60m market opportunity in India this election year. 

Globally, over 60 countries are set to hold national elections in 2024, and the possible misuse of artificial intelligence to influence public opinion has caused a moral panic, turning into a global hot-button issue.

India witnessed the first-ever use of deepfakes in election campaigning in 2020, when BJP politician Manoj Tiwari sanctioned the creation and distribution of deepfake videos of himself campaigning in Haryanvi and English, languages he does not speak. Experts decried the video, but on the grounds that it was shared without disclosure that it is AI-manipulated.

An additional issue in resurrecting a deceased politician is: Who owns the rights to the dead person’s voice and likeness?

From a social impact standpoint, to what extent these AI videos — even poorly made ones — could shape voter attitudes remains unclear. Leveraging sentimental appeals from specific stalwarts or families — especially when it is personalised and sent on WhatsApp — can be an effective communication strategy and could sway voter opinion. But perspectives of policy advocates and practitioners sharply diverge on synthetic media’s effectiveness.

Sources:

AI and elections: An introduction to the special issue

Al Jazeera