AI-generated content doesn’t seem to have swayed recent European elections

AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had no effect on election results in the UK, France, and the European Parliament this year, according to new research.

Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors' ability to spread fake content with the potential to interfere with elections or even sway the results. Such worries were particularly heightened this year, when billions of people were expected to vote in over 70 countries.

Those fears seem to have been unwarranted, says Sam Stockwell, the researcher at the Alan Turing Institute who conducted the study. He focused on three elections over a four-month period from May to August 2024, collecting data on public reports and news articles on AI misuse. Stockwell identified 16 cases of AI-enabled falsehoods or deepfakes that went viral during the UK general election and only 11 cases in the EU and French elections combined, none of which appeared to definitively sway the results. The fake AI content was created by both domestic actors and groups linked to hostile countries such as Russia.

These findings are in line with recent warnings from experts that the focus on election interference is distracting us from deeper and longer-lasting threats to democracy.

AI-generated content seems to have been ineffective as a disinformation tool in most European elections this year so far. This, Stockwell says, is because most of the people who were exposed to the disinformation already believed its underlying message (for example, that levels of immigration to their country are too high). Stockwell's analysis showed that people who were actively engaging with these deepfake messages by resharing and amplifying them had some affiliation or previously expressed views that aligned with the content. So the material was more likely to strengthen preexisting views than to influence undecided voters.

Tried-and-tested election interference tactics, such as flooding comment sections with bots and exploiting influencers to spread falsehoods, remained far more effective. Bad actors mostly used generative AI to rewrite news articles with their own spin or to create more online content for disinformation purposes.

AI is not really providing much of an advantage for now, as existing, simpler methods of creating false or misleading information continue to be prevalent," says Felix Simon, a researcher at the Reuters Institute for Journalism, who was not involved in the research.

However, it's hard to draw firm conclusions about AI's impact upon elections at this stage, says Samuel Woolley, a disinformation expert at the University of Pittsburgh. That's in part because we don't have enough data.

There are less obvious, less trackable, downstream impacts related to uses of these tools that alter civic engagement," he adds.

Stockwell agrees: Early evidence from these elections suggests that AI-generated content could be more effective for harassing politicians and sowing confusion than changing people's opinions on a large scale.

Politicians in the UK, such as former prime minister Rishi Sunak, were targeted by AI deepfakes that, for example, showed them promoting scams or admitting to financial corruption. Female candidates were also targeted with nonconsensual sexual deepfake content, intended to disparage and intimidate them.

There is, of course, a risk that in the long run, the more that political candidates are on the receiving end of online harassment, death threats, deepfake pornographic smears-that can have a real chilling effect on their willingness to, say, participate in future elections, but also obviously harm their well-being," says Stockwell.

Perhaps more worrying, Stockwell says, his research indicates that people are increasingly unable to discern the difference between authentic and AI-generated content in the election context. Politicians are also taking advantage of that. For example, political candidates in the European Parliament elections in France have shared AI-generated content amplifying anti-immigration narratives without disclosing that they'd been made with AI.

This covert engagement, combined with a lack of transparency, presents in my view a potentially greater risk to the integrity of political processes than the use of AI by the general population or so-called bad actors,'" says Simon.