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In the midst of the election season in the United States, Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to destabilize the American electoral system, as it is increasingly easier to use it to create false audiovisual content and spread it, which can fuel misinformation and confuse voters in your decision.
What once required a studio budget and a production team can be done with a few clicks; The result is that every day voters try to navigate an electoral landscape in which it is difficult to identify the authenticity of images, messages and videos, such is the case of those made with AI of Afro-descendant voters who support former President Donald Trump and who have recently been widely circulated.
Of particular concern is the impact that AI can have not only in presidential elections, but also in local elections, generating a false idea of the candidates, this is what experts said during a briefing held by Ethnic Media Services.
Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a non-profit surveillance agency, commented that there are disinformation campaigns that aim to influence the upcoming November elections, giving as an example the detection of one carried out in Russia aimed at social networks, where they posed as American citizens, all created by artificial intelligence.
?Artificial intelligence is attacking voter participation every day and now also has the power to flood our political discourse and create messages, videos and support for voters and candidatescough?, he stressed.
Generative artificial intelligence is a system that creates news information following a human suggestion such as images, audio and text, something that can be very simple and fun, in some way, however, in sensitive topics it becomes a risk for everyone, since creating False images can jeopardize veracity and create conflicts, Mehta Stein mentioned.
In order to protect information, political leaders must be aware, work on laws that support review, and on encryption of digital information, however, misinformation will continue to be present, so each social media user and person has the duty to take care of what you consume, making sure it is true before sharing it.
Jinxia Niu, director of the Chinese Digital Engagement program at Chinese for Affirmative Action, commented that they have detected more than 600 pieces of disinformation that circulated on social networks in the last 12 months, most of them attacking Trump, but Biden has also been attacked through AI-generated photos.
Niu assured that the biggest challenge is that the community does not review what it shares, specifically immigrants, who have limited access to information due to their language; There are very few ethnic media, which leaves a large gap for false information to circulate, since if it is in its language of origin it is even easier to influence.
The expert added that, lately, AI is generating messages through messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and others, which makes containing misinformation even more difficult, since the threat is not only found on social networks.
Brandon Silverman, former CEO and co-founder of CrowdTangle (now owned by Meta), commented that information on social networks is difficult to separate into false and true, giving the example that the moon is made of cheese, when many people or in metaphors assure that the moon is made of cheese.
These gray spaces that are generated between the information, Silverman commented, make it difficult to divide what is false or not, since it is not so easy to separate or identify it in a system.
?What has been observed is what they called "flooding the area", this is creating so much content towards one direction that at some point one no longer knows what to trust.iar?, he stressed.
In that sense, he pointed out that there are three pillars: one is to see who is sending the information, which would be the party that generates the offer; The second is the demand it generates, an important action to identify why they continue to consume it; and the third is to know the mechanisms that are being used for supply and demand, since this is how the medium they use to disseminate is identified.
Experts agree that it is important to verify messages before sharing them, search various official media to see if what is said is true, and not take for granted everything that circulates on social networks or chat groups. The responsibility belongs to everyone, because with the speed at which AI moves, it becomes almost impossible to have an effective verification system that is up to date.
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