In all, 60 countries in the world will be going to the polls this year, including India, and the factor which will cause most ruckus will be Artificial Intelligence - what is popularly known as AI. This technological advancement does not pose a threat only to democracy but also to the voting process. The ruling party seems to have taken the AI’s potential seriously, which has led to the Centre issuing certain instructions to companies with AI platforms. One of the orders have mandated companies to give a unique code to the information searched through Google and open AI so that it becomes easier to track the origin and authenticity of the information. The government in its orders has also stated that there should be feature in the softwares which will allow people to identify creators of fake texts, audios and videos. These companies have been given a 15-day deadline to come up with the action report.
The reason for this is the strange answers given by Google’s Gemini AI to the questions related to Prime Minister Narendra Modi which went viral on various social media platforms. The answers by AI connected Modi with the ideology of fascism which led to the Minister of State for IT Rajiv Chandrashekhar condemning Google’s AI engine and accusing it of violating the country’s IT laws. However, the main question is, how does one stop it all? There are always two sides to anything and AI’s other side can be terrifying. One can tweak and morph faces, voices, physical appearances to mislead the other person. For instance, phone calls were made in USA during New Hampshire’s primary by using the AI-generated voice of President Joe Biden. The AI version of Biden during the calls appealed to people not to cast their votes. Therefore, those being benefitted by AI are also worried about the boomerang effect as this could prove to be just as fatal for them as well.
According to a recent study by AI Democracy Projects and Proof News, it has come to light that many a times the new AI tools give out misleading information regarding the elections. Another example of how AI could be misused to get a political party or a leader into trouble is what occurred during the Telangana State elections, where a seven-second clip started to go viral on the voting day when people had queued up to vote. In the clip, the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samiti’s KCR was shown appealing people to vote for them. This clip was shared largely on the unofficial WhatsApp groups run by the Congress party. During the coming months, between March and May, around 1 billion voters will decide the fate of the national government, which would be the biggest elections in world history. The world was taken aback in January when pop star Taylor Swift’s AI-generated images went viral. Last November, India’s IT Minister Aswhini Vaishnav had raised concerns over ‘deepfake’ content and had called it a threat to the democracy. Deepfake is a technology which helps in generating fabricated images, audio-visuals and audio recordings with uncanny resemblance to the real person and his/her qualities.
Although the Union government has expressed concern over the misuse of AI tools, the ruling party, Congress and almost all the political parties have been deploying deepfake content to influence their voters. Many AI tools which offer deepfake features are either available free online or at an extremely negligent price. And truth be told, BJP is far ahead than its competitors when it comes to using technology to gain leverage in the elections with 2014 being the most prominent example. In 2012, BJP used Modi’s holograms so that he could virtually appear at dozens of places at the same time during the election campaigns. However, in February 2020, BJP’s own parliamentary member Manoj Tiwari became the world’s first leader to use deepfake in an election campaign. In three videos, Tiwari addressed voters in Hindi, Haryanvi and English ahead of Delhi’s assembly elections with only Hindi video being the real one while other two being generated through deepfake. In the recent months, Tamil Nadu’s ruling party DMK with the use of AI used former screenplay writer and stalwart politician M Karunanidhi’s visuals as a living person. So advanced and equally scary is AI. Hence, many political analysts have claimed that AI will be largely used in the upcoming 2024 elections and it would be beyond anyone to crosscheck its authenticity.