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‘The regulatory landscape is wholly insufficient’: The growing challenge of AI in American politics

6 0
31.01.2024

NEW YORK — A Manhattan Democratic Party boss let loose in a profanity-laced tirade against a sitting elected official.

“I dug her grave and she rolled into it,” Keith Wright, a fixture in New York politics, could be heard saying. Punctured by profanities, he described a rival as “lazy, incompetent — if it wasn’t for her, I’d be in Congress.”

The 10-second clip spread quickly among Harlem political players — a seemingly stunning hot mic moment for the influential leader. But there was a problem: It was faked.

The audio was generated by artificial intelligence to sound like Wright, and shared anonymously to cause political chaos. Wright quickly denounced it.

The episode, first reported by POLITICO, marks one of the latest and most egregious uses of deepfake audio yet in the 2024 election year, and it serves to expose the growing use of AI as a nefarious tool in American politics.

The incident also alarmed law enforcement officials and AI experts, who warned it forebodes the dissemination of misinformation in elections across the country in coming months and years. And there’s little the nation can do about it.

“The regulatory landscape is wholly insufficient,” Ilya Mouzykantskii, a political consultant who’s using AI-generated audio to phonebank voters, told POLITICO. “This will be the dominant tech story of this election year.”



The faked Wright audio marked the first instance POLITICO could identify of AI-generated content being used against a political opponent in New York, coming on the heels of a manipulated Joe Biden robocall ahead of the New Hampshire primary.

The art of persuasion and trickery are nothing new in politics. From the famed Watergate scandal of the Nixon White House, to the “Swiftboat” attacks against John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, to Russian interference the 2016 election of Donald Trump, incendiary tactics have long been a part of American elections. And they are not reserved for White House........

© Politico


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