Artificial intelligence has quickly evolved from a novelty to a standard tool in the Argentine electoral process. To help them win, candidates and their supporters use photo and video editing software to modify and create new campaign materials. Artificial intelligence has made it possible to include fictional quotes from candidates in movies and memes. Because of this situation, people are starting to doubt the authenticity of online videos.
Artificial intelligence has been used to create campaign posters plastered throughout Buenos Aires. Sergio Massa, a leading candidate in Argentina’s presidential contest, drew widespread notice when he appeared in public “wearing a shirt decorated with what appeared to be military medals. Standing amidst a sea of old individuals dressed in dismal clothes,” their weathered faces reflecting a tumultuous past, all eyes were riveted on him with a spark of optimism.
The style was correct. The illustrator has very specific directions to follow. Like Mr Massa’s campaign input a prompt reading, “Sovietic Political propaganda poster illustration by Gustav Klutsis featuring a leader, Massa, standing firmly,” into an artificial-intelligence software to create the image. ‘The surroundings are saturated with symbols of unity and power,’ the query read. The image is powerful and decisive, the artist said.
The other candidate, Javier Milei, has responded to Mr. Massa’s campaign ads by circulating what appear to be artificial intelligence images depicting Mr. Massa as a Chinese communist ruler and himself as a cuddly cartoon lion. More than 30 million people have seen them.
AI’s crucial involvement in Argentina’s campaign and the political controversy it has sparked up the technology’s growing relevance and suggest that, given its developing power and dropping cost, it is likely to be a factor in many democratic elections across the globe.
Some experts have drawn parallels between the current scenario and the early days of social media, which offered exciting new political tools and unexpected risks. Mr. Massa’s team has built an AI system that can simulate candidates, running mates, and political allies engaging in various activities.
A lot of it is obviously made up. Some works, however, have become outright misleading. Mr. Milei illustrates how a market for human organs would work in one “deepfake” video produced for the Massa campaign, which he has maintained conceptually fits in with his libertarian ideals.
Imagine having kids and treating them all like investments. A falsified video, including a doctored photograph of Mr Milei, was posted to the Massa campaign’s “AI for the Homeland” Instagram account, which promotes artificial intelligence-related content.
Researchers have long worried about how AI would affect future elections. Voters may be misled and confused by the technology, resulting in confusion contributing to the disinformation spread by social media.
Those worries were mostly theoretical for many years because the technology required to create such forgeries was too complex, expensive, and rudimentary. Henry Ajder, a British expert who has advised governments on A.I.-generated content, recently stated that “now we’ve seen this absolute explosion of incredibly accessible and increasingly powerful democratized tool sets” and that this “radically changed” the previous assessment.
One Toronto mayoral candidate this year showed gloomy artificial intelligence-generated photographs of homeless individuals to show what the city could become if he were not elected. In the United States, the Republican Party made an AI-made animation depicting a dystopian future in which China has occupied Taiwan, among other things, should President Biden be re-elected.
To mock Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who has become an enemy of the American right for his leadership of the nation’s pandemic response, the campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted a video showing artificial intelligence-generated pictures of Trump hugging Fauci.
So far, the Argentine campaigns’ AI-generated content has either been identified as such or is so obviously falsified that it is unlikely to fool even the most naive voters. Instead, technology has reduced the time it would have taken teams of graphic artists to create content with the same potential for going viral.
This week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced that it would require political ads to disclose if they used artificial intelligence (AI). No disclaimers would be required for any other type of unpaid post on the AI-using sites, regardless of its topic area. In addition, the US Federal Election Commission is considering restricting the use of AI in political advertisements. Researchers from London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who study online platforms, have issued a statement calling for stricter rules in this area. The group’s head of technology and society, Isabelle Frances-Wright, raised alarm over the widespread usage of artificial intelligence in Argentina’s election. “I think it’s a slippery slope,” she remarked. What looks plausible now will seem much more so a year from now.
By combining Mr. Massa’s image with pop and meme culture, the Massa team employed AI to show that Peronism, the 78-year-old political movement behind him, can win over young voters. Campaign engineers and artists used open-source software called Stable Diffusion to train an artificial intelligence system to generate fake portraits of Argentina’s top political leaders using photos of real people. More than a dozen of Argentina’s most prominent politicians can now be portrayed in an instantaneous photo or video undertaking virtually any action.
Throughout the campaign, Mr. Massa’s communications staff has been in touch with artists using AI to relay messages like national unity, family values, and fear, among other things. The creatives then talked about how to work with Mr. Massa, Mr. Milei, and other politicians into works that make allusions to specific movies, internet memes, artistic movements, or historical events.
The Massa campaign used its AI to create a series of parody images of Mr. Milei and his supporters costumed as zombies for Halloween. The campaign also used AI to create a dramatic movie trailer, complete with the destruction of Buenos Aires, Mr. Milei as a straitjacketed monster, and Mr. Massa as the liberator of Argentina. There have also been sightings of artificially generated imagery. The Soviet posters were among dozens of drawings prepared by Mr. Massa’s campaign and supporters for distribution in Argentina’s public venues.
The campaign used AI to generate some of the visuals. However, Mr Massa’s followers created other images of him riding a horse like Argentine independence hero José de San Martin using artificial intelligence. Some individuals are questioning reality since AI has become a factor in the election in Argentina. Last week, a video of Mr. Massa appearing exhausted after a campaign event went viral, prompting accusations from his opponents that he was under the influence of drugs. His supporters instantly reacted, suggesting the video was a deepfake. His team, however, established that while the footage was actual, Mr. Massa was not under the influence.
Artificial intelligence is used to hide past transgressions, as stated by Mr. Massa. “It’s very easy to hide behind artificial intelligence when something you said comes out, and you didn’t want them to,” Mr. Massa said in the interview.
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