Artificial Intelligence & the 2024 Election
There is little doubt that AI will transform our lives. The beneficial applications promise to be myriad. “AI allows us to see patterns in data that humans cannot grasp,” Stephen Cave, director for the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, explains. “And that will have benefits for all sorts of fields: from drug discovery to improved energy use and from personalized medicine to increasing efficiency in water crops.”
But there is a definite downside to the science, and the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes and misinformation might well affect our next elections. In January, two days before the New Hampshire primary, a robocall impersonating President Biden used AI voice-cloning technology to discourage Democrats from going to the polls. Last year, a series of photorealistic images depicted Donald Trump being violently arrested by cops. A fake video of Hillary Clinton showed her endorsing Republican Ron DeSantis, and the DeSantis campaign distributed a deepfake of Donald Trump hugging Tony Fauci.
