No political deepfake has alarmed the world’s disinformation experts more than the doctored audio message of U.S. President Joe Biden that began circulating over the weekend.
In the phone message, a voice edited to sound like Biden urged voters in New Hampshire not to cast their ballots in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. “Save your vote for the November election,” the phone message went. It even made use of one of Biden’s signature phrases: “What a bunch of malarkey.” In reality, the president isn’t on the ballot in the New Hampshire race — and voting in the primary doesn’t preclude people from participating in November’s election.
Many have warned that new artificial intelligence-powered video and image generators will be used this year for political gain, while representation for nearly half of the world is on the line in polls. But it’s audio deepfakes that have experts worried now. They’re easy to edit, cheap to produce and particularly difficult to trace. Combine a convincing phone message with a voter registration database, and a bad actor has a powerful weapon that even the most advanced election systems are ill-equipped to handle, researchers say.
“The political deepfake moment is here,’’ said Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy think tank Public Citizen. He called on lawmakers to put in place protections against fake audio and video recordings to avert “electoral chaos.”
The fake Biden message comes as an increasing number of U.S. political campaigns use AI software to reach constituents en masse — and as investors are pouring money into voice-cloning startups. On Monday, while the deepfake phone message was making the rounds, the AI voice-replicating startup ElevenLabs announced it had raised a new round of funding that valued the company at $1.1 billion.
The doctored political recording wasn’t the first. Last year, audio deepfakes spread on social media ahead of Slovakia’s parliamentary elections,…
