AI will change American elections, but not in the obvious way

THE day before Chicago’s mayoral election in February, a recording began circulating online. It was first posted on Twitter (now X) by a newly created account called Chicago Lakefront News. It featured what sounded like Paul Vallas, the law-and-order candidate, bemoaning all the fuss about police brutality and harking back to a halcyon time when cops could kill suspects by the dozen “and no one would bat an eye”. It was political dynamite and was quickly shared by thousands. But the voice in the recording was not Mr Vallas’s, nor any human’s: it was a “deepfake”, generated by artificial-intelligence (AI) software, which had been trained to mimic the sound of Mr Vallas’s voice.

This is the sort of incident that is keeping candidates, political analysts and anyone worried about the health of democracy up at night. Countries with a collective population of some 4bn—including America, Britain, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Taiwan—all vote for leaders in 2024. Given AI’s existing capabilities and rapid evolution, it seems inevitable that at least some of these contests will be manipulated by subterfuges like the one that targeted Mr Vallas. Tech luminaries are sounding the alarm. Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google (and a former member of The Economist Group’s board), has warned that “the 2024 elections are going to be a mess because social media is not protecting us from false generative AI”. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, recently posted that he was “nervous about the impact AI is going to have on future elections (at least until everyone gets used to it)”.