The AI Elections: How Technology Could Shape Public Sentiment

A video of a politician was slowed down to make them sound drunk. This 'shallow fake' shows how easily opinion is manipulated, no complex AI required.

#1about 6 minutes

The growing threat of AI-generated media manipulation

AI can now generate entire videos, songs, and deepfakes, posing a significant threat to public discourse, as shown by the real-world Zelensky deepfake.

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AI's role in shaping public opinion during elections

With major global elections underway, AI tools can create psychographic profiles and spread false stories six times faster than true ones, echoing the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

#3about 5 minutes

The technical process behind creating real-time deepfakes

Creating a real-time deepfake involves a multi-step process including face detection with MediaPipe, pixel segmentation, background inpainting, and using a dual autoencoder to swap faces.

#4about 3 minutes

Demonstrating deepfake attacks and social engineering

A live demonstration and real-world examples show how deepfakes can be used for social engineering, leading to significant financial loss and tricking people into executing malicious files.

#5about 5 minutes

Training a language model for automated social media posting

A GPT-2 model was fine-tuned on data scraped from Reddit and Twitter to automatically generate convincing but inflammatory social media comments, demonstrating bot capabilities.

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Why automated detection tools and shallow fakes fail

Automated AI detection software often fails to identify novel generation methods, while simple "shallow fakes" like slowed-down videos or out-of-context images are highly effective at misleading the public.

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Practical steps for manually identifying fake news

The most reliable way to combat misinformation is through critical thinking, which involves investigating the source, checking the date, considering satire, and being aware of personal biases.