Deepfakes Barely Impacted 2024 Elections Because They Aren’t Very Good, Research Finds
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
It seems that although the internet is increasingly drowning in fake images, we can at least take some stock in humanity's ability to smell BS when it matters. A slew of recent research suggests that AI-generated misinformation did not have any material impact on this year's elections around the globe because it is not very good yet.
[...] In the U.S., the News Literacy Project identified more than 1,000 examples of misinformation about the presidential election, but only 6% was made using AI. On X, mentions of deepfake" or AI-generated" in Community Notes were typically only mentioned with the release of new image generation models, not around the time of elections.
Interestingly, it seems that users on social media were more likely to misidentify real images as being AI-generated than the other way around, but in general, users exhibited a healthy dose of skepticism. And fake media can still be debunked through official communications channels, or through other means like Google reverse image-search.
It is hard to quantify with certainty how many people have been influenced by deepfakes, but the findings that they have been ineffective would make a lot of sense. AI imagery is all over the place these days, but images generated using artificial intelligence still have an off-putting quality to them, exhibiting tell-tale signs of being fake. An arm might unusually long, or a face does not reflect onto a mirrored surface properly; there are many small cues that will give away that an image is synthetic. Photoshop can be used to create much more convincing forgeries, but doing so requires skill.
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