Earlier in the year, an AI-generated clone of President Biden's voice in a campaign robocall captured the public's attention about what generative artificial intelligence is capable of. But while it can be used to manufacture evidence of things that didn't happen, the main use of AI in U.S. political campaigns this year appears to have been to generate memes and visual commentary.
After Hurricane Helene made landfall, images made with artificial intelligence of suffering people and pets proliferated online, some of which were used to criticize the Biden administration. In the days after former President Donald Trump amplified a hateful false claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, AI-generated images portraying Trump protecting animals spread on social media, gaining a large number of views on X, formerly Twitter, in part thanks to X's new AI tools.
Even though users quickly flagged some of the images as being AI-generated, at least some of the prominent political figures who shared the images said it didn't matter to them.
"It's a form of political propaganda, a way to signal interest and support for a candidate, almost like in a fandom kind of style," said Renée DiResta, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, who recently wrote a book about online influencers. "The political campaigns then can pick it up, can retweet it, can boost it and are then seen as being sort of in on the conversation, maybe in on the joke themselves."
There's an arms race underway between the latest generative AI tools and detection technology. So far, the detection tools' reliability varies, and researchers say the public needs to rely on forensic experts to tell whether a piece of media is authentic or synthetic.
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