Online disinformation operations aimed at disrupting US elections are nothing new. Hillary Clinton had to deal with Russian attempts on the Internet to attack and discredit her when she ran for president in 2016.
But a lot has changed over the years. Foreign adversaries, including Russia, continue to target American candidates, as well as the American democratic system as a whole, but they have now the power of artificial intelligence to make their campaigns bigger, fancier and more compelling than ever.
Advances in artificial intelligence in recent years have allowed people to generate convincing phishing emails And deep fakes. As AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot compete for market share, they continually develop new features, all of which carry the risk of abuse.
“I think anyone who isn’t concerned isn’t paying attention,” said Clinton, who served as secretary of state and a U.S. senator before her presidential campaign.
Clinton made the comments Thursday during a panel discussion at an event focused on the impact of AI on the 2024 global elections. Hosted at Columbia University in New York, the event was jointly sponsored by the Aspen Digital think tank and the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
During the event, Clinton and other panelists spoke about the need for government and technology companies, particularly those in social media, to work together to combat the spread of misinformation and misinformation. They also highlighted how disinformation campaigns often target women, pushing an already underrepresented population out of politics.
“We see women disappearing from the public space,” said Věra Jourová, vice-president for values and transparency at the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union.
Political parties around the world are eager to recruit women to run for office because they know it is a good way to attract voters, Jourová said.
“But when women become politicians, the same political parties are not honest enough and courageous enough to defend them,” she said.
Election security has been a major topic in the last two presidential elections. Much was made during the 2016 election about the possibility that a foreign government, such as Russia’s, could “hack” the election, either by changing the results and winners without anyone knowing, or by making it so obviously improbable that it would destroy confidence in the system. .
But little evidence of interference was found, and over the next four years, many states that used the kind of voting technology that experts were worried about replaced it and strengthened their systems.
There was worried about potential piracy before the 2020 elections, but officials found no evidence of any form of widespread electoral fraud. Chris Krebs, then director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agencythe federal agency responsible for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats, declared the 2020 vote as “the safest election in American history.
The concern expressed by the panel is that AI could significantly intensify these threats. And it’s already happening. As New Hampshire’s presidential primaries approach in January, some voters in the state received automated calls apparently using AI technology to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice and told them not to come to the election.
While it remains to be seen what damage AI-powered misinformation could wreak ahead of this year’s general election, “there’s more than enough reason to be concerned about what we’ve already seen,” said Clinton.
Nothing could be more dangerous than an effort to discredit the US electoral system that is bolstered by AI-powered deepfakes and leaves American voters in the dark about what is real and what is not. not, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said during another panel.
“It would be like pouring gasoline on a fire,” he said.
