The Apocalypse That Wasn’t: AI Was Everywhere In 2024’s Elections, But Deepfakes And Misinformation Were Only Part Of The Picture

It's been thebiggest yearfor elections in human history: 2024 is a super-cycle" year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also thefirst AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it's instructive to take stock of how democracy did.

In a Pew survey of Americans from earlier this fall, nearly eight times as many respondentsexpected AI to be used for mostly bad purposesin the 2024 election as those who thought it would be used mostly for good. There are real concerns and risks in using AI in electoral politics, but it definitely has not been all bad.

The dreaded death of truth" has not materialized - at least, not due to AI. And candidates are eagerly adopting AI in many places where it can be constructive, if used responsibly. But because this all happens inside a campaign, and largely in secret, the public often doesn't see all the details.

Connecting with voters

One of the most impressive and beneficial uses of AI is language translation, and campaigns have startedusing it widely. Local governments inJapanandCaliforniaand prominent politicians, including India Prime MinisterNarenda Modiand New York City MayorEric Adams, used AI to translate meetings and speeches to their diverse constituents.

Even when politicians themselves aren't speaking through AI, their constituents might be using it to listen to them. Google rolled out free translation services for an additional110 languagesthis summer, available to billions of people in real time through their smartphones.

Other candidates used AI's conversational capabilities to connect with voters. U.S. politiciansAsa Hutchinson,Dean PhillipsandFrancis Suarezdeployed chatbots of themselves in their presidential primary campaigns. The fringe candidateJason Palmerbeat Joe Biden in the American Samoan primary, at least partly thanks to using AI-generated emails, texts, audio and video. Pakistan's former prime minister,Imran Khan, used an AI clone of his voice to deliver speeches from prison.

Perhaps the most effective use of this technology was in Japan, where an obscure and independent Tokyo gubernatorial candidate,Takahiro Anno, used an AI avatar torespond to 8,600 questionsfrom voters and managed to come in fifth among a highly competitive field of 56 candidates.

Nuts and bolts

AIs have been used in political fundraising as well. Companies likeQuillerandTech for Campaignsmarket AIs to help draft fundraising emails. Other AI systems help candidatestarget particular donorswithpersonalized messages. It's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of these kinds of tools, and political consultants are cagey about what really works, but there's clearly interest in continuing to use these technologies in campaign fundraising.

Polling has been highly mathematical for decades, and pollsters are constantly incorporating new technologies into their processes. Techniques range from using AI to distill voter sentiment from social networking platforms - something known as social listening" - to creatingsynthetic votersthat can answer tens of thousands of questions. Whether these AI applications will result in more accurate polls and strategic insights for campaigns remains to be seen, butthere ispromisingresearchmotivated by the ever-increasing challenge of reaching real humans with surveys.

On the political organizing side, AI assistants are being used for such diverse purposes ashelping craft political messages and strategy,generating ads,drafting speechesand helpingcoordinate canvassingand get-out-the-vote efforts. In Argentina in 2023, both major presidential candidatesused AIto develop campaign posters, videos and other materials.

In 2024, similar capabilities were almost certainly used in a variety of elections around the world. In the U.S., for example, a Georgia politicianused AIto produce blog posts, campaign images and podcasts. Even standard productivity software suites like those from Adobe, Microsoft and Google now integrate AI features that are unavoidable - and perhaps very useful to campaigns. Other AI systems helpadvise candidateslooking to run for higher office.

Fakes and counterfakes

And there was AI-created misinformation and propaganda, even though it was not as catastrophic as feared. Days before a Slovakian election in 2023,fake audiodiscussing election manipulation went viral. This kind of thing happened many times in 2024, but it's unclear if any of it had any real effect.

In the U.S. presidential election, there was a lot of press after a robocall of afake Joe Biden voicetold New Hampshire voters not to vote in the Democratic primary, but that didn't appear to make much of a difference in that vote. Similarly, AI-generated images from hurricane disaster areas didn't seem to have much effect, and neither did a stream ofAI-faked celebrity endorsementsorviral deepfake images and videosmisrepresenting candidates' actions and seemingly designed to prey on their political weaknesses.

AI also played a role in protecting the information ecosystem. OpenAI used its own AI models todisrupt an Iranian foreign influence operationaimed at sowing division before the U.S. presidential election. While anyone can use AI tools today to generate convincing fake audio, images and text, and that capability is here to stay, tech platforms also use AI to automaticallymoderate contentlike hate speech and extremism. This is a positive use case, making content moderation more efficient and sparing humans from having to review the worst offenses, but there's room for it to become more effective, more transparent and more equitable.

There is potential for AI models to be much more scalable and adaptable to more languages and countries than organizations of human moderators. But the implementations to date on platforms like Meta demonstrate that a lotmore workneeds to be done to make these systems fair and effective.

One thing that didn't matter much in 2024 was corporate AI developers' prohibitions on using their tools for politics. Despite market leader OpenAI's emphasis onbanning political usesand its use of AI to automaticallyreject a quarter-million requeststo generate images of political candidates, the company's enforcementhas been ineffectiveand actual use is widespread.

The genie is loose

All of these trends - both good and bad - are likely to continue. As AI gets more powerful and capable, it is likely to infiltrate every aspect of politics. This will happen whether the AI's performance is superhuman or suboptimal, whether it makes mistakes or not, and whether the balance of its use is positive or negative. All it takes is for one party, one campaign, one outside group, or even an individual to see an advantage in automation.

Bruce Schneier, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School and Nathan Sanders, Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.