Maybe one day deepfakes created by AI will be so convincing that they truly throw a wrench into our political discourse, further separating fact from fiction. And plunging us into a new dark age of mis- and disinformation, allowing the cruel and calculating to hold sway through AI-generated deceit. But until then, AI-generated propaganda is still too shitty to make much of a difference. And it didn’t make much of a difference at all in the 2024 elections in the UK and US.
According to a report from the Alan Turing Institute that analyzed all the propaganda churned out during this year’s European elections, the Institute found almost no evidence that the elections were impacted by AI.
AI Deepfakes Didn’t Sway the 2024 Election
All told, the Institute narrowed it down to just 27 pieces of AI-generated content that went viral during the European elections. None of this made much of an impact since the people being exposed to AI-generated propaganda were people who already aligned with the views being expressed by that propaganda. It didn’t crossover. It was AI slop made by members of a specific political party to sate other members of that party with the sloppy bias-confirming garbage they crave.
Here in the United States, according to the News Literacy Project, an organization that catalogs around 1000 examples of misinformation surrounding the 2024 presidential election, only 6 percent of it all involved generative AI. That 6 percent didn’t fool anybody, as most users were able to identify it as fake.
Just because Deepfakes and AI-generated propaganda didn’t affect anybody’s opinion this time around doesn’t mean we are in the clear. The technology will only get better as time goes on. Remain vigilant and skeptical, citizen.
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