Deepfakes, Disinformation and the Year of Elections: An Interim Scorecard
Keynote: Rasmus Nielsen (Professor of Political Communication, University of Oxford and Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism)
Enigma Room, The Alan Turing Institute
A panel discussion hosted by The Alan Turing Institute
2024 has been described as “the year of elections”. Already this year, we have seen elections in multiple countries including Mexico, France, the United Kingdom, India and the EU Parliament - and the one in the US still to come. Much media hysteria has proclaimed that these elections – and the broader notion of democratic government – would be threatened by a tsunami of deepfake disinformation and targeted political “dark ads”. While “fake news” is now a longstanding phenomenon which regulators and platforms have tried, perhaps with not huge success but some awareness, to curtail, deepfake images, audio and video are a newer and less guard railed phenomenon, especially as generative AI has improved it beyond anything imagined before 2022 or so.
Have deepfakes turned out to the electoral game changer that was feared or , as some research seems to show, are voter minds cannier than we thought and/or more resistant to change? Is the real threat as before, really targeted political ads or grassroots disinfo? What evidence have we gathered in this time? What regulatory and self regulatory solutions have worked and what are still needed? And should we allow, or even encourage, candidates to campaign as AI avatars?