By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on February 1, 2024
Who needs press conferences with civilized exchanges, debates with politicians behind podiums or speeches in a square when you have instant access to unfiltered digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI)?
In Mexico, AI-generated audios that simulate the voices of candidates and leaders have already crept into politics. Just a week ago, Democratic voters heard Joseph Biden on their cell phones recommending them not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. It was later revealed that the automated call was an imitation of the also candidate for the November elections in the United States.
The plagiarism of the voices is almost child’s play when compared to the skills of the Dilley Meme Team, a group hired by Donald Trump for the presidential campaign. The hyper-realistic fake videos they produce obliterate what little was left of political correctness in the race for the White House. For example, one features a half-naked woman with the face of former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley kicking a man with the face of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the groin. Another shows Casey DeSantis, the Governor’s wife, as a porn star.
However, the zombie content war didn’t start here. Six months ago the DeSantis-aligned super PAC Never Back Down used an artificial intelligence-generated version of the Trump voice in a TV ad. In another ad a fake Hillary Clinton claimed she likes the Florida governor because “he’s just the kind of person this country needs, and I mean it.”
The reaction of the Trump team was not long in coming. Before the third Republican presidential debate, they released a video clip imitating the voices of his running mates where they are presented with the nicknames invented by the former president. The wives of his adversaries appear with reddened knees, as if they had just performed fellatio.
New applications make it easier and easier to produce so-called “deepfakes” and more difficult to identify, while regulation and control lags behind the development of these technologies. There are formulas to control what the official pages of candidates publish, but nobody controls what their followers do, as has happened in Argentina with Javier Milei’s army of trolls. The number of these contents on the Internet doubles every six months and has more than 134 million views. More than 90 percent of the cases are pornography without consent.
Generative AI technology has progressed to the point where representations of anyone (saying or doing almost anything) can be produced with relative ease if a model is given photos, video footage and audio recordings. It’s a big leap from where the technology was just a couple of years ago, when the role of AI in politics was largely a humorous device.
As a result, the next U.S. election may be decided by whichever party makes the best use of these technologies. Disinformation experts have warned that unprecedented levels of manipulated content will be shared on social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Twitter (now X) in this year’s campaign.
Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, interim dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, assured The Hill that “2024 will be an AI election, in the same way that 2016 or 2020 were social media elections.”
But it’s not the advance of AI that has changed politics. Donald Trump and his imitators have discovered that election campaigns and troll government are not sustained by information, but by the distortion of perceptions that ensures they are always front and center in the news.
Every time Trump, Bolsonaro and now Milei break a taboo or tell a lie, there is always a parade of well-dressed anchors and college-educated journalists who go out of their way to condemn the offense. They do not understand that the troll does not traffic in the currencies to which politicians and the media were accustomed: money and influence. They deal in a new one: attention.
Perhaps no one in history has demonstrated better than the Republican mogul the maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The cycle of outrage and “middle finger politics,” as National Review’s Rich Lowry has called it, made Trump president, then kept him there, and is one step away from bringing him back to the White House.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English