Guardian US is co-hosting an event on 12 September at 7.30pm PT with Bay Area public media outlet KQED and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism focused on the impact artificial intelligence could have on elections and democracy.
The panel will discuss worries over the role AI could play in this year’s elections and beyond, including manipulated or deepfaked media and false information spread on platforms. These disruptions could increase as the November elections near.
KQED’s Rachael Myrow and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang will moderate the conversation with California state senator Scott Wiener, California Common Cause executive director Jonathan Mehta Stein, and Encode Justice founder Sneha Revanur.
In an ongoing series, the Guardian has covered some of the threats AI poses on elections and the potential it has to disrupt or confuse the voting process – as well as the ways the mere threat of what AI could do might lead to voters doubting whether something is real or faked.
AI-generated material has already shown up in US elections, starting with a robocall before the New Hampshire primaries where a faked voice of Joe Biden told people not to vote. The company that sent the call agreed to a $1m fine, while the person who orchestrated it faces criminal charges and a $6m fine.
Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X, has shared AI-generated content, including a video that faked Kamala Harris’s voice and a photo of the vice-president in a communist uniform. The platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, has spread false information about elections.
As part of the Bots v Ballots series, the Guardian has detailed how AI’s advancement outpaces attempts to regulate it, and what that means for voters, and investigated an AI-based tool that would allow people to file mass challenges to voters’ eligibility, potentially preventing eligible people from casting ballots.
The Guardian also created deepfake audio to show how easy it is to make and how hard it can be for people to distinguish, and talked to deepfake detection experts to understand what we should look for when analyzing a piece of media. And the Guardian reported on how a lawmaker used an AI chatbot to write a bill that regulates AI in elections.
