How AI and deepfakes are changing politics | BBC News

pop star Taylor Swift and politicians such as US President Joe Biden count it's important that you save your vote for the November election UK labor leader Kia starma sick of and London's mayor sadique Khan have all found themselves victims of deep fakes in recent months I control the Met police they will do as the mayor of London tells them and Obey orders whether it's fake explicit images or audio recordings of conversations that haven't ever happened dodgy deep fakes created using readily available AI powered tools have spread like wildfire across social media sewing seeds of mistrust

and blurring the lines between reality and often malicious fiction but in this confused and confusing landscape what happens when politicians use deep fake technology themselves to find out we need to take a trip from the Big Smoke to the Big Apple attentions focused here in lower manatt New York City Hall it's become almost commonplace for Bad actors to deep fake politicians but it's unusual for politicians to deep fake themselves that's something that the mayor of New York has actually done towards the end of last year mayor of New York Eric Adams revealed in a press

conference that he'd used deep fake technology to make a series of automated or Robo calls to NYC residents in these calls which mainly promoted the hiring of venues owned by the city the mayor was able to speak a variety of languages including Mandarin Cantonese and Spanish using deep fake Tech these actions have raised more than a few eyebrows in certain quarters to find out more I needed to leave Manhattan and head to Brooklyn it's here I caught up with civil rights and privacy campaigner Albert Fox Khan he believes the mayor's use of AI sets a

dangerous precedent and to me it's really just this alarming wake up call about the potential for abuse of these deep fake Technologies when you normalize the use of this sort of deep fake technology when you use it to convey authentic government announcements then you're basically educating the public that deep fakes are reliable that you should trust what you hear in a deep fake we there's huge potential to use deep fakes to really undermine trust in government and Trust in our institutions the mayor's office declined our request for an interview but Eric Adams has publicly stated

New York City will be doing more stuff with AI and will use it and not abuse it political use of this technology is on the rise around the world Henry Ida is an authority on deep fakes and AI this isn't just a western phenomenon this is really Global and one that really Springs to mind happened in India where a BJP candidate that's the ruling party used a similar technology to essentially speak different Regional dialects that he couldn't actually speak and in this example it wasn't disclosed clearly to the audience that this was AI generated and

when it emerged that it was the actual BJP party disowned this use and kind of uh decried it as something that they didn't want and then more recently in the Indonesian elections that happened earlier this year we saw um an avatar of a synthetically resurrected deceased um previous leader coming back to endorse one of the candidates president Indonesia but in the Argentinian elections late last year we saw both candidates using AI generated images to depict the opponents as weak but also to embolden themselves making them look like heroes or strong men my concern I guess

is that if we do start to see politicians really embracing this and this is becoming a much more high volume form of political communication it will lead to increasing distrust in media of politicians more broadly there's an estimated 2 billion people voting in elections across the globe this year the stakes have never been higher when it comes to determining political fact from fake