Time is running out to enact wholesale changes to ensure Britain’s electoral system keeps pace with advances in artificial intelligence before the next general election, regulators fear.
New laws will not come in time for the election, which will take place no later than January 2025, and the watchdog that regulates election finance and sets standards for how elections should be run is appealing to campaigners and political parties to behave responsibly.
There are concerns in the UK and US that their next elections could be the first in which AI could wreak havoc by generating convincing fake videos and images. Technology of this type is in the hands of not only political and technology experts but increasingly the wider public.
One example of the type of new obligations that could be legislated for in the UK is an onus on political parties to detail how much they are spending on AI.
The UK government is continuing discussions with regulators including the Electoral Commission, which says new requirements under legislation from 2022 for digital campaign material to include an “imprint” for it will go some way to ensuring voters can see who paid for an ad or is trying to influence them.
“But voters will still not be able to see how much money parties and campaigners have spent specifically on digital advertising ahead of an election, or if an ad they are seeing has been generated using AI,” said Louise Edwards, the director of regulation and digital transformation at the Electoral Commission.
She said the law regulating political campaigning and spending at elections had lagged behind the growth and methods of digital campaigning. “There is an issue around how campaigners are spending their money, but there is also a concern on our part around public confidence in how political campaigning,” she said.
Confidence in the way online campaigning is regulated was “far too low”, Edwards said, pointing to the commission’s own research which found that nearly 60% of the public were concerned about the regulation of political campaigning online.
“In an area like online campaigning, and in particular AI [where] the law isn’t up to date, we would say there is a role here for different people involved in elections to act responsibly,” she said. “That’s where campaigners acting responsibly comes in, and us as regulators thinking what we can do to make sure people have confidence in the next election, which is likely to take place before January 2025, which is not very far away.”
While campaigners were being urged to behave responsibly, Edwards said legislative changes would inevitably have to wait until after the election.
On Wednesday the president of Microsoft, a key backer of the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, said governments and tech companies had until the beginning of next year to protect the 2024 elections in the UK and US from AI-generated interference.
Brad Smith said governments should revise existing laws to make AI-generated disinformation illegal and decide how AI-based misleading content should be dealt with.
“We do need to sort this out, I would say by the beginning of the year, if we are going to protect our elections in 2024,” he said at an event hosted by the Chatham House thinktank.
He said he expected tech firms to launch an initiative for watermarking AI-generated content.
Concerns over the potential misuse of generative AI has soared after breakthroughs in the technology, with tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney producing convincing text, images and even voice on command.
Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington last month that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users.
“The general ability of these models to manipulate and persuade, to provide one-on-one interactive disinformation is a significant area of concern,” he said.
While earlier software applications known as bots relied on simple pre-written messages sent en masse on online platforms, or buildings full of paid trolls to perform the manual work of engaging with other humans, ChatGPT and other technologies raise the prospect of interactive election interference at scale.
