Already this year, a robocall generated using artificial intelligence targeted New Hampshire voters in the January primary, purporting to be President Joe Biden and telling them to stay home in what officials said could be the first attempt at using AI to interfere with a US election. The “deepfake” calls were linked to two Texas companies, Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom.

It’s not clear if the deepfake calls actually prevented voters from turning out, but that doesn’t really matter, said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of Public Citizen, a group that’s been pushing for federal and state regulation of AI’s use in politics.

Examples of what could be ahead for the US are happening all over the world. In Slovakia, fake audio recordings may have swayed an election in what serves as a “frightening harbinger of the sort of interference the United States will likely experience during the 2024 presidential election”, CNN reported. In Indonesia, an AI-generated avatar of a military commander helped rebrand the country’s defense minister as a “chubby-cheeked” man who “makes Korean-style finger hearts and cradles his beloved cat, Bobby, to the delight of Gen Z voters”, Reuters reported. In India, AI versions of dead politicians have been brought back to compliment elected officials, according to Al Jazeera.

Yeah, and a lot of the stuff we find is actually from Israeli soldiers who’re misbehaving and doing stuff that I would say are definitely violations of international laws. But that’s coming on their social media accounts—they post it themselves.Another issue is: Because of the lack of electricity there, you actually get a lot of stuff happening at night that you can’t really see in the videos. Like the convoy attack that Israel had the drone footage of—there’s lots of footage of that, but it’s just all at night and it’s pitch-black. But there was a good piece of analysis I saw recently where they used the audio and could actually start establishing what weapons were being used. Just the sound itself makes it very distinct …