Artificial intelligence helped predict voter turnout in last year’s Mississippi election, when a group used AI techniques to transcribe, summarize and synthesize audio recordings of canvassers’ interactions with voters to produce reports on what voters were hearing in each county.
Another group recently compared messages translated by humans and AI into six Asian languages and found that they were all equally effective. The Democratic firm tested four versions of voice-over ads (two spoken by humans and two by AI) and found that the AI male voice was just as convincing as its human counterpart. (female voices outperformed their AI counterparts).
The age of artificial intelligence in election campaigns has officially arrived. But this much-anticipated and much-feared technology remains confined to the fringes of American election campaigns.
With less than six months until the 2024 election, the political use of AI, both as a constructive communication tool and a means to spread dangerous disinformation, has become more theoretical than transformative. Masu. The Biden campaign has said it is strictly limiting its use of generative AI, which uses prompts to create text, audio, and images, to productivity and data analysis tools, while the Trump campaign has not used the technology at all. He said he did not.
“This is a dog that didn’t bark,” said Dmitri Melhorn, a political adviser to Reid Hoffman, one of the Democratic Party’s most generous donors. “We haven’t found anything cool with generative AI that we can invest in to actually win elections this year.”
Hoffman is far from an AI skeptic — he previously served on the board of Open AI and recently “interviewed” an AI version of himself — but so far the only political applications of technology worthy of his money and attention are what Melhorn calls “unsexy productivity tools.”
Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist who runs a campaign technology investment fund, agrees. “AI is changing the way campaigns are run, but in the most boring and mundane way imaginable,” he said.
Technologists and political activists have little doubt that AI will ultimately have the power to transform the political arena. A new report from Higher Ground Labs, which invests in political technology companies to benefit progressive causes and candidates, says AI is still in the “experimental stage” but represents a “generational opportunity” for Democrats to move forward. ” is also said to be.
For now, the Democratic National Committee is conducting more modest experiments, including using AI to spot unusual patterns in voter registration records and find notable voter deletions or additions.
Janine Abrams McLean, president of the nonprofit Fair Count, which led the AI experiment in Mississippi, said the pilot project involved AI-transcription of 120 audio notes recorded after meetings with voters. The team then used the AI tool Crowd to map out geographic differences in opinion based on the interlocutors’ opinions of the interaction.
“When we synthesized the voice notes using this AI model, we found that the emotions coming out of Coahoma County were more active and that they were planning to vote,” she said. “Meanwhile, we didn’t hear the same sentiments in Hattiesburg.”
Sure enough, she said, turnout was down in the Hattiesburg area.
Larry Huynh, who oversaw the AI-narrated ads, said he was surprised by how well the AI voices performed: He and most of his colleagues at Democratic consulting firm Trilogy Interactive found the male AI voice “the most awkward,” but testing showed it to be convincing.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a human voice to make an effective ad,” said Huynh, who thinks deeply about the ethics and economics of AI technology as the current president of the American Association of Political Consultants. Still, he added, tinkering with models to create new AI voices was as time-consuming and expensive as hiring voice actors.
“I don’t think we actually saved any money,” he said.
Democrats and Republicans alike are racing to defend against the threat of an emerging category of political dark arts featuring AI-enabled disinformation in the form of deepfakes and other false or misleading content. Before the New Hampshire primary in January, AI-generated robocalls that imitated President Biden’s voice in an attempt to suppress votes led to new federal rules banning such calls.
The incident highlighted the disadvantages for regulators, lawmakers and election officials in dealing with even novice pranksters who can act more quickly and anonymously. The fake Biden robocalls were made by a New Orleans magician who holds world records for fork bending and escaping from a straitjacket. He said he used an off-the-shelf AI product that took 20 minutes and cost $1.
“What’s concerning is that it was so easy for a regular person who didn’t have much experience with AI or technology to make a call,” New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan said of AI’s use in this spring’s elections. said during a Senate committee hearing on the role.
AI is “like a match with gasoline,” said Rashad Robinson, who helped write an Aspen Institute report on the information chaos that followed the 2020 race.
Robinson, president of racial justice group Color of Change, outlined such a “nightmare” scenario and said it would be nearly impossible to prevent. “You might hear a local pastor call 3,000 people and say, ‘Don’t come to the polls because there are armed white people here,'” he said. “There’s no real accountability and no real consequences for the people who are building the tools and the platforms that make this possible.”
The prospect of similar 11th-hour AI confusion is keeping New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver up at night: In the run-up to the state’s primary, she ran an ad campaign warning voters that “AI isn’t all that clear this election season” and advising them to “when in doubt, research it.”
“Elections often put us behind the eight ball,” she said, adding, “And now we have to deal with this new wave of activism.”
AI is already being used to mislead campaigns abroad: In India, an AI version of Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed voters by name on WhatsApp; in Taiwan, an AI rendering of outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen appeared to promote cryptocurrency investment; and in Pakistan and Indonesia, dead or imprisoned politicians have reappeared as AI avatars to appeal to voters.
So far, most fakes have been easily debunked. But Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, which studies disinformation, said in a recent report that deepfake tools are “likely not yet on the market” enough to sway the US election. He warned that it is becoming more sophisticated day by day.
In the 2024 election campaign, many candidates are approaching artificial intelligence cautiously, if at all.
In a statement, spokesman Steven Chang said the Trump campaign “does not engage with or use AI,” but he said the campaign uses “a suite of proprietary algorithmic tools, like many other campaigns across the country, to more efficiently deliver emails and prevent false information from being added to our lists.”
But despite Trump’s campaign’s reluctance toward AI, his supporters have been stopped from using the technology to create deepfake images of the former president surrounded by black voters. Mr. Trump is actively courting this constituency.
The Biden campaign says it is severely restricting the use of AI, saying, “Currently, the campaign is only permitted to use generative AI for productivity tools such as data analysis and industry-standard coding assistants.” said campaign spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg.
A senior Biden official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, said AI is most often deployed in campaigns to find efficiencies behind the scenes, such as testing which marketing messages lead to clicks and other forms of engagement. He said that This process is known. as conversation marketing. “This is not science fiction,” the official added.
As artificial intelligence occupies a central place in the zeitgeist, some campaigns have found that simply deploying this technology can draw attention to their message.
Last year, a wave of coverage ensued after the National Republican Congressional Committee showed AI-generated images of national parks as migrant tent cities. In response to a recording released by the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump (her song was called “Anything is Possible”), the Democratic National Committee used AI to identify Trump and He created a diss track mocking Republican funding. and attracted the attention of celebrity gossip site TMZ.
But digital political strategists are still figuring out how well AI tools work in practice. Many involve mundane data-crunching tasks, but some involve more novel ideas, like an AI-powered eye-contact tool that keeps people in the video from looking away, potentially streamlining the recording of scripted videos. Because the White House has blocked the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with the special counsel, Republicans could, for dramatic effect, use an AI-generated track of Biden reading the transcript instead.
“There’s not a single person out there who hasn’t tried prewriting content,” said Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic digital strategist, about using generative AI to create early drafts of fundraising messages. . “But I don’t know many people who have found this process helpful.”
In Pennsylvania, a congressional candidate used an AI-powered phone banking service to conduct two-way phone conversations with thousands of voters.
“I share everyone’s serious concerns about the potential for AI to be misused in politics and beyond,” candidate Shamaine Daniels said on Facebook. “But we also need to understand and embrace the possibilities this technology brings.”
She finished the contest in third place by a wide margin.
