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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 1/27/24: Deepfaking Biden [1]

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Date: 2024-01-27  

The wondrous promise of Artificial Intelligence has already reared its head in the 2024 election.

As reported by Andrew Paul, writing for Popular Science:

AI vocal cloning technology is reportedly already muddying the waters ahead of the 2024 election. According to a statement issued by the New Hampshire attorney general’s office on Monday, a robocall campaign deployed over the weekend used an imitation of President Joe Biden’s voice to urge recipients not to vote in the state’s January 23 presidential primary. “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” an AI-generated Biden told residents over the phone. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”

As many are aware, President Biden’s name was not included on the New Hampshire ballot for the primary this Tuesday given the DNC’s decision to elevate South Carolina to the poll position for its primaries. New Hampshire has a law in place requiring that it go first, so as a result voters had to write in President Biden’s name in order to avoid an embarrassing victory by gadfly Dean Phillips. Despite Phillips’ presence, Biden won the primary handily thanks to a campaign urging voters to write in his name. As Paul notes, the deepfake message had specifically attacked that effort, saying that it would somehow hurt Biden’s re-election prospects.

It's not yet known who prepared the deepfake, but as noted by the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic party, it was “obviously somebody who wants to hurt Joe Biden.” Both the Trump campaign and Phillips campaign have vehemently denied involvement.

Paul continues:

At least some Phillips supporters, however, are embracing other AI tool tactics, despite warnings to the contrary. Late last week, The Washington Post noted that Dean.Bot—a chatbot created by a pro-Phillips SuperPAC—had been removed from OpenAI’s recently launched online store for “knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning.” Despite the slap on the wrist, Phillips remains a favorite of some Silicon Valley’s top players. The SuperPAC behind Dean.Bot, We Deserve Better, was co-founded by the former chief of staff for Sam Altman, OpenAI co-founder and recently fired-and-rehired CEO. Altman himself has met with Phillips, although he has yet to endorse or formally donate to the congressman’s campaign.

As noted by Rebecca Klar, writing for the Hill, the fake Biden robo-call represents the tiniest tip of the iceberg of disinformation efforts we can expect going into the election season.

As the technology becomes harder to detect and easier for anyone to use, experts said more AI election content will likely emerge, which could sow confusion and distrust among voters. “This is kind of just the tip of the iceberg in what could be done with respect to voter suppression or attacks on election workers,” said Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “It was almost a harbinger of what all kinds of things we should be expecting over the next few months,” she added.

The New Hampshire AG’s office is investigating to try to determine the source of the call.

You can hear the call in this report by David Pakman (go to the 1:20 mark) . It sounds exactly like Biden.

I’m writing this on Thursday morning and will be away over the weekend, so my apologies if this has already been covered by our intrepid community.

Oscars update: Having now seen "Barbie" for the third time, I've concluded it's not only the best picture of the year (based on the ones I've seen at least, such as "Oppenheimer;" sorry, Christopher Nolan but for me Robert Downey, Jr. is now Tony Stark no matter what role he plays), but really one of the more important and resonant films of the 21st century, thus far. And yes, Greta Gerwig got royally screwed by the Academy.

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