AI-Generated Political Campaigns Are Already Getting Ugly
The potential for deception is off the charts
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Most Americans are already sick of divisive political campaigns riddled with negativity and bad Photoshop images. But those are already way behind us. Artificial Intelligence’s abilities put the ability to slander and deceive into the hands of anyone with malice, almost instantly.
And to generate and distribute thousands of deceptive ads in minutes for free on social media and fake news sites. You don’t need skills beyond a basic understanding of how to write prompts to direct the bots to generate almost any message.
Stop and think about this. It doesn’t even require any costly equipment or production dollars. And any wack job out there can create images, video, and audio virtually indecipherable from the real thing. We’re about to get flooded with a sickening amount of disgusting content on every device we own.
Actually it’s already happening. When Biden announced his Presidential run, MAGA Republicans immediately released a three minute video depicting a dystopian reality that would descend upon us if he wins, and not one bit of it was real.
As a former techie and marketing writer, I don’t even have to think about how this will work, pardon me, is working. We already live in a world rife with lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation and most of us are incapable of knowing what is real and what it not.
The current US debt ceiling battle shows us how politicians manipulate numbers and make up facts on the fly, each side showing numbers that have no relation to reality. And there is a knee jerk mentality, particularly on the far right, to react indignantly and angrily without even verifying anything is true.
We’ve seen this with Freedom Caucus House members angrily waving sheathes of paper and declaring they have evidence of wrongdoings, evidence that when examined falls to pieces. But they operate on a basic human principle, that if you repeat a lie often enough many will believe it, proof or not.
And this stuff is nothing compared to what is being created right now by unsavory political operatives, autocratic governments, and angry high school loners.
