A comparison of an original and deepfake video of Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post via Getty Images-enabled deepfakes will degrade democracy. Half of the world’s population are voting in 70 countries this year. Some 1,500 experts polled by thein late 2023 reckoned that misinformation and disinformation were the most severe global risk over the next two years. Even extreme weather risks and interstate armed conflict were seen as less threatening.
Deception has been a feature of human nature since the Greeks dumped a wooden horse outside Troy’s walls. The Daily Mail’s publication of the Zinoviev letter – a forged document purportedly from the Soviet head of Comintern – had a big impact on the British general election of 1924. Yet, so far at least, deepfakes are not wreaking as much political damage as feared. Some generative AI start-ups argue that the problem is more about distribution than generation, passing the buck to the giant platform companies. At the Munich Security Conference in February, 20 of those big tech companies, including, pledged to stifle deepfakes designed to mislead. How far the companies are living up to their promises is, as yet, hard to tell but the relative lack of scandals is encouraging.
Two Harvard Kennedy School experts, Vandinika Shukla and Bruce Schneier, who studied the use of AI in the campaign, concluded that the technology was mostly used constructively.