How AI could have a massive impact on the General Election

Artificial intelligence is going to make this year’s General Election pretty interesting, to say the least, a top computer scientist has warned.

From deepfake speeches to uncanny AI-generated photographs, voters on social media may struggle to tell what’s real on social media in the coming weeks.

Indeed, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Britons will head to the ballot boxes on July 4.

Dame Wendy Hall, who co-chaired the government’s 2017 AI review, suggested social media sites could limit posts about politics on polling day to prevent misinformation.

Elections across the world in 2024 could be impacted by AI-generated images and videos, the regius professor of computer science at the University of Southampton suggested while speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme podcast.

Asked about the risks of AI to the democratic process, Dame Wendy told the BBC: ‘It is almost too late to do it for this year now, to actually act in any concerted way.

‘We should have been thinking about it earlier and I was worried, I think what the safety institutes are doing is incredibly important.

‘But we should also keep thinking about how AI can be used for the bad in democratic elections and the use of deepfakes.

‘The cat is out of the bag really, so we are going to have to, I think we need a lot of public awareness around this to make people – and I know that the media are thinking about this – to make people think about where have they got this information from, what is the provenance of this information.

‘Because there is no time to change laws or bring in big technical fixes before these elections start happening now.’

In what has been dubbed a year of elections, other contests which could shape the future direction of international relations include the presidential poll in the USA in November.

And we’ve already had a taster of what’s to come. From an Argentine presidential candidate into Indiana Jones and a Ghostbuster to a robotically voiced fake Joe Biden telling Americans not to vote among them.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is currently in the midst of a general election and has seen political parties accuse one another of spreading doctored content.

Dame Wendy also suggested social media companies like Facebook and X could do more to prevent misinformation on their platforms.

While acknowledging that the idea was not fully fleshed out, she said: ‘We don’t allow campaigning on the day of the election. We could put some sort of embargo into what you can put on social media very close to the election.

‘I am not trying to stop freedom of speech at all, but in terms of working with the companies to check what is being put around about the politicians who are standing.’

Even if such a ban were introduced, its impact could be negligible on postal voters, who can submit their ballot ahead of polling day.

At the 2019 general election, some 21% of all valid votes cast were postal votes, according to the House of Commons Library.

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