A deep fake video of US Vice President Kamala Harris saying: “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today so the future today will be as the past today, as it is tomorrow.” went viral on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The deepfake was a mashup of audio that’s been circulating on TikTok to make fun of Harris together with her speech at Howard University. Full Fact noted that Artificial Intelligence(AI) was used to make this video.

AI-generated content is flooding Facebook and other social media platforms ahead of the 2024 presidential elections, said panelists at the Ethnic Media Services briefing in July 2024. In January 2024, for instance, voters in New Hampshire received ‘robocalls’ featuring an AI-generated voice clone of President Biden discouraging them from going to the polls. It is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between real and artificial news, said panelist Brandon Silverman, former Facebook executive and co-founder of CrowdTangle.

Silverman, who in the past revealed the extent to which Facebook users engaged with hyperpartisan right-wing politics and misleading health information on social media platforms, fears that many social media platforms have reduced their investment in election-integrity work. Given the ease of generating disinformation with Artificial Intelligence, the growth of this danger is multiplicative. 

Disinformation creates mistrust in communities

“One of the goals of disinformation campaigns is, what is called, flooding the zone which is creating so much untrustworthy content that communities and voters don't know what to trust at all,” said Silverman.

Generative AI is enabling bad actors to produce images, audio, and video that tell their lies at an unprecedented scale and persuasiveness for virtually nothing, reveals the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s recent report. This report shows that AI-voice cloning tools…are wide open to abuse in elections.

"Some of the most popular AI-driven voice cloning tools allow users to impersonate political leaders with ease. “Guardrails for these tools are so severely lacking – and the level of skill needed to use them is now so low – that these platforms can be easily manipulated by virtually anyone to produce dangerous political misinformation,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH.

 “It is very often that elite and trusted sources in media information ecosystems are the most important spreaders of disinformation,” said Silverman at the briefing.

Communities of color are affected the most

In an out-of-control information wasteland, communities of color suffer unfairly, and in Silverman’s view, hard to defend. His experience at Facebook showed him that there were far fewer staff dedicated to understanding the local nuances and context of certain political environments.

In 2016 Russia’s disinformation programs zeroed in on Black Americans, creating Instagram and Twitter accounts that masqueraded as Black voices and producing fake news websites such as blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org, and blacksoul.us.

“In the last 12 months, we documented over 600 pieces of disinformation across all major Chinese-language social media,” said Jinxia Niu, program manager for Chinese digital engagement at the nonprofit organization Chinese for Affirmative Action, during the briefing. 

“The content may be fact-checked and debunked in the English mainstream media but their translated versions into Chinese for instance, remain unchecked. We don’t have the capacity to check every piece of content, especially with the volume of AI-generated content,” said Niu.

 This disinformation circulates through shared posts by influencers, friends, and family on encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp for Indian Americans, and Telegram for Europeans, Africans, and Asians. There are other apps like WeChat for Chinese Americans and Signal for Korean and Japanese Americans where they have seen disinformation spread as well.
“These private chats become like unregulated, uncensored public broadcasting that you can’t monitor or document due to well-intentioned data and privacy protections,” Niu explained. “It creates a perfect dilemma where it’s difficult, if not impossible, to intervene with fake and dangerous information.”
“Civic discourse is playing out on X and Facebook,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein, Executive Director of California Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog agency. 

What starts as a joke leaves disturbing results

“It was not that those images were persuasive, or they made them believe something they didn't, or changed their mind about an important topic,” said Silverman “They were just either fun, they were trolling or they were simply giving the audience an opportunity to express solidarity you know that they agreed, or thought this was hilarious.”

Sneering hosts, posts, and messages create smeared reputations, deepen beliefs, and make Presidents.  Late-night shows laced with humor fueled the rise of Trump. Can generative AI make or break Kamala Harris’s candidacy?