In India and In Indonesia, deceased leaders rise to support their political successors; rapper Eminem supports opposition parties in South Africa; and in the United States, President Biden is advising voters in New Hampshire to stay home. All of these things “happened” – but none of them are true. The generative artificial intelligence revolution has already arrived and will arrive during your elections. Welcome to the future, welcome to 2024.
For the first time, the widespread availability of generative AI will directly impact political campaigns and elections. 2024 is already an unprecedented year for democracy: over 2 billion people – the most in history – will vote in national, local and regional elections in over 60 countries.
The global electorate must now grapple with this up-to-date technology. Deepfakes can be used for everything from sabotage to satire to the seemingly mundane: We’ve already seen AI chatbots writing speeches and answering questions about a candidate’s policies. But we’ve also seen AI used to demean politicians and make world leaders appear to be promoting the joy of passive income scams. Artificial intelligence is being used to deploy bots and even tailor automated text messages to voters.
Experts know that generative AI has the potential to drastically change the information landscape, but we’re still learning how exactly that will happen. Problems that have long plagued tech platforms, such as disinformation and disinformation, disingenuous or hateful content, are likely to worsen despite the guardrails the companies say they have put in place.
So to really get a sense of how generative AI is entering and changing the political and information landscape, we’re following it around the world for the rest of the year.
Here’s what we do:
The list and map you see here will be continuously updated throughout 2024. On the map, you’ll be able to see each country where we’ve identified the utilize of generative AI in elections, and how many times. On the cards you will be able to get more information about each specific incident, including when and what it was. In addition to the information shown in each example, we will also track the companies, tools and platforms involved.