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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

16/03/24 09:48 AM IST

AI, elections, disinformation

In News
  • In March 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal brought into mainstream public discourse the impact of social media on electoral politics, and the possibility of manipulating the views of Facebook users.
Three way trouble
  • AI can accelerate the production and diffusion of disinformation in broadly three ways, contributing to organised attempts to persuade people to vote in a certain way.
  • First, AI can magnify the scale of disinformation by thousands of times.
  • Second, hyper-realistic deep fakes of pictures, audio, or video could influence voters powerfully before they can be possibly fact-checked.
  • Third, and perhaps most importantly, by microtargeting.
  • The risks are compounded by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter significantly cutting their fact-checking and election integrity teams. While YouTube, TikTok and Facebook do require labelling of election-related advertisements generated with AI, that may not be a foolproof deterrent.
  • The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Perception Survey, ranks misinformation and disinformation among the top 10 risks, with easy-to-use interfaces of large-scale AI models enabling a boom in false information and “synthetic” content — from sophisticated voice cloning to fake websites.
  • The report also warned that disinformation in these elections could destabilise societies by discrediting and questioning the legitimacy of governments
  • The researchers were able to create fake images of Donald Trump being led away by police in handcuffs and Joe Biden in a hospital bed
Regulation in India
  • The Indian government has asked digital platforms to provide technical and business process solutions to prevent and weed out misinformation that can harm society and democracy.
  • The IT Ministry had issued an advisory to companies such as Google and OpenAI, and to those running foundational models and wrappers, that their services should not generate responses that are illegal under Indian laws or “threaten the integrity of the electoral process”. 
  • The government clarified that the advisory was directed only towards “significant” platforms, and not startups, the episode underlines the need for regulators to tread with caution on the fine line between countering AI-linked misinformation and being seen as stifling AI-led innovation.
Source- Indian Express

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