Nothing is real
AI tools are the hot new toys every kid wants for Christmas. Just like crypto was the hot, new, get-rich investment? We gave a sidelong glance at using AI in political campaigns just last week.
The Atlantic‘s Russell Berman offers another take beginning with the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, practically begging Congress (in Berman’s telling) to regulate his industry.
Firms hyping the new tools name-drop candidates such as former Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman whose campaigns have used them already. But?
“I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me.
Promoters pitch generative-AI as a way for small-time candidates to campaigns like the big kids, using it “to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches.” And to increase the number of targeted ads and emails you spend time blocking and deleting.
What the robots won’t do is retail politics:
Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”
And the darker downside?
“We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told Berman:
Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. [Democratic Representative Yvette] Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.
But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.
This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”
Bah, say consultants. Me? I’ve seen this movie too many times to be so glib:
Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.
Strawberry jam, Strawberry Fields. Nothing is real. It was more harmless in the 1960s.