misinformation has been a common concern the last two presidential election cycles and one expert says that the ingredients are there for a tsunami of misinformation this year as well this time aided by artificial intelligence Dr Orin etani is the former CEO and current board member and adviser for the Allen Institute for AI he's also with the University of Washington he joins us now to discuss ai's role in spreading misinformation this year thanks for joining us doctor thank you Austin very important topic absolutely uh you know AI existed uh in the last presidential cycle in 2020
but what concerning advancements have we seen in the years since well AI is generally a great thing but in this context it's definitely a concern it's gotten cheaper it's gotten faster and it's gotten better at creating what's called deep fakes and so um we are about to see something that's very different than the last election cycle when you talk about deep fakes I think a lot of people think of uh well a fake image that's trying to pass its way almost that uncanny valley that you hear people talk about in what way can a deep
fake be nefariously used when we talk about an election so first of all you're right there's uh there's images there's audio right you can hear somebody's voice saying something they didn't say and there's video which is the worst because it seems uh so convincing the obvious use case and we've already seen this with different elections I saw one today uh depicting the president of the Ukraine belly dancing and I can assure you he was not belly dancing it was a deep fake and so you see people doing and saying things they did didn't do uh
and you find yourself in this strange situation uh who are you going to believe me or Your Lying Eyes so what we're playing on the screen here is a compilation of some of the presidential candidates you see President Biden on the screen here how difficult would it be for somebody to make a deep fake that perhaps mimics exactly what we're seeing on screen Unfortunately today it's something that a Semite technical person can do with maybe a couple of hundred dollars and how is that so attainable because if I put a hundred a couple hundred dollars
towards something I wouldn't know how to do that but how are people in a position to make such a powerful piece of content for such a low amount of money so two things have happened the first one is creation of these very uh powerful models like uh chap chat GPT and the visual ones but what's happened is people have put a second layer on top of that there are various uh websites where it just makes it really easy even for somebody who's not an expert and to create uh these fakes so I don't want to
start naming names and URLs and I don't want to uh in any way promote this agenda but we have to be aware and everybody's watching this needs to be aware that when you see a video you have to ask yourself is it real what's the source and am I sure that what I'm seeing really happen and what we're seeing right now is chat GPT being used to type up some sort of text in a classroom chat GPT uh AI really as a whole can be used for for so many uh purposes a report from Free
Press uh that's a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights in Tech and media says that in the runup to 2024 X formerly known as Twitter meta and YouTube have together removed 17 policies that that protected against hate and misinformation could you see uh the removal of those policies playing a role in 2024 yes I I I think that this problem is huge think of like uh email spam right there was a point where every other email I was getting was some kind of spam and then we figured out uh some at least uh partial Solutions
so this problem requires uh policies uh requires Technologies requires education on the part of the public this is why our conversation here is so important there is no Silver Bullet where a a policy by uh meta or by the federal government or a technology that we can develop is going to solve it all we need to combine these pieces and the policies that were removed and the teams that were fired are definitely part of the problem when we talk about how AI can affect a presidential election is there any information out there perhaps any Clarity
on whether or not any of this AI misinformation tends to favor a particular political party well I I think that what we are about to see in 2024 is uh unprecedented because it used to be a very sophisticated operation that would try to sway the vote but now we're going to see uh small actors uh non-state actors uh foreign actors uh think of it effectively as cyber terrorism um doing things it's extremely difficult I think to predict who they're going to favor but um historically they've been um uh anti-incumbent so um I I am definitely
uh worried about um portrayals of President Biden and the administration but the truth is we just don't know when we talk about 2016 we talk about 2020 obviously misinformation was a big part of those elections and and how we assessed those elections after they took place uh doctor how much more misinformation if you can quantify it even how much more information or perhaps how much more widespread do you expect misinformation to be in 2020 for compared to 2016 and 2020 that's a very fair question Austin and I would say that what's clear is that we're
going to see a different kind right so it's always been the case that politicians have made uh statements that at the very least require uh extensive back uh factchecking and of course uh the elephant in the room is um uh the uh unsubstantiated claim names of uh election fraud and stolen elections uh and so on but what we're going to see um for the first time is documentary evidence videos you're G to hear stuff that just didn't happen you're G to hear a person saying stuff and it's going to sound like whatever major political candidate
it is but it's not going to be them so that's why I'm talking about um a tsunami of misinformation that's why I think we're going to see a phase change so it's less about the amount uh and more about the kind of misinformation and the kind can have an unprecedented effect in swaying the electorate Dr Orin etone thank you so much for your analysis thank you
