Why AI Didn't Impact the 2024 Elections
13:25 Share

Today, on the A I daily brief, why A I didn't really impact the twenty four elections. The AI daily brief is a daily podcast in video about the most important news discussions in A I to join the conversation, follow the discard and our shown notes. Welcome back to the daily brief.

Today is, of course, election day in the united states. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, many of which we will not be getting into on the show. However, there are some interesting things to explore when IT comes to artificial intelligence.

Part of that is, of course, policy. Looking forward, A I is likely to be one of the most consequential issues faced by the next president, whether it's commoner Harris or donor trump. The bite and White houses made IT clear that A I is a national security priority.

All indicators suggest that the U. S. Is getting more and more convinced that competitiveness and global leadership in A I is a major strategic comparative. A I is already finding a way into policy v of v china and trade restrictions.

And what's more, on top of all of this, over the next four years, the capabilities of A I are likely to continue to grow, making IT just ever more significant to the structure of society and the economy. Yet today, what I want to explore is the election itself. God willing, this will be the last day of the election, although i'm not overly optimistic about that.

And it's useful to maybe go back and remember just how terrified people were of this exact moment because of artificial intelligence. What's on your screen right now? And apologies if you're just listening, but i'll describe IT is google search results for A I elections from november twenty twenty two, which is, of course, when ChatGPT launched two about six months later in june of twenty twenty three.

There are infinite thought pieces about this, the parents center for justice, how A I puts elections at risks and they needed safeguards. Brookings, how A I will transform the twenty twenty four elections on P B S dot org. A I generated this information poses thread of misleading the conversation.

How A I could take over elections and undermine democracy. Aioc, how A I is already changing the twenty twenty four election. A, P, A, I presents political perl for twenty twenty four threat to lead times.

A, S, using elections sets off a scramble for guard rails. Scientific american, how I could take over elections? Bb, A, B, B, A, B, you get the point. The point is that there was a lot of concern that I was going to be very, very bad for the selection cycle and that I would be the beginning of a persistent chAllenge.

And by the way, this wasn't just from anti tech folks x, google, CEO and prolific A, I investor eric chen said that A, I would make the twenty twenty four elections of mess for me. IT was all about the social media platforms not taking responsibility, saying that they were not protecting us from false generate eye. Now, of course, the fear was that A I was going to create widespread access to incredibly powerful, high quality general audio imaging video, making IT, incredibly cost effective and easy to run, large scale of information campaigns.

This fear was really ratched IT up when generated video started getting good at the beginning of this year. In february, for example, around the first previews of OpenAI, sora experts became terrified of the implications. Or and it's the only the founder of non profit media, dorg said, generate A I tools are evolving so rapidly, and we have social networks, which leads to an a killy heal in our democracy.

And IT couldn't have happened at the worst time. As we're trying to sort this out, we're coming up against one of the most consequential elections in history. The threat was presumed to be so real that the department of homeland security put out a bullet ton in may.

They warned that, quote, a variety of threat actors will likely attempt to use general artificial intelligence, augmented media to influence and so discord during the twenty twenty four us election cycle and A I tools could potentially be used to boost efforts to disrupt elections as the twenty twenty four election cycle progresses. Generate A I tools likely provide both domestic and foreign read actors with enhances opportunities for interference by aggravating emerging ets, disrupting election processes or attacking election infrastructure. And then, of course, there is history.

I, an incipient author, you will know a hori. He had some of the most bombastic and traumatic warnings addressing the U. N.

A. I, for good global eva. He said, now that is possible for the first time in history, to create fake people, billions of fake people.

If this is allowed to happen, IT will do the society what fake money threatened to to the financial system. If you can't know who is a real human, trust will collapse. Maybe relationships will be able to need some help in our democracy.

Now, presumably he's talking about cyp to there. And at the risk of blood dening the streams of these podcasts, i'm not totally sure the analog gy holds the turn of water given that cypher is bigger than it's ever been. And nothing in the economy seems to be breaking because of IT, but that's neither here nor there.

And he was the point is that hori is very concerned and isn't really sure about whether democracy and A I can co exist. Today's episode is brought you by vantage, where if you're starting or scaling your company security program, demonstrating top notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Penta automates compliance for I S O twenty seven O O one soc two gdpr and leading A I frameworks like I S O forty two thousand one and N I S T A I was management framework, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust.

Plus you can streamline security reviews by automating questionaire and demonstrated your security posture with a customer facing trust center. All power by vent to A I over eight thousand global companies like LangChain lea AI in factory A I use vantage to demonstrate A I trust, improve security in real time, learn more, invented 到 com flash N L W that's ventadour com slash N L W toy's episode is brought you by plum want to use A I to automate your work， but don't know where to start. Plum lets you create A I workload by simply describing what you want.

No coding or A P I keys required. Imagine typing out A I analyzed my zoo meetings and send me your insights in notion and watching IT come to life before your eyes. Whether you're an Operations leader, market or or a non technical founder, plumb gives you the power of A I without the technical hassle.

Get into the access to top models, GPT O D assembly A I technology to you. Check out use that's plum with A B for early access to the future of worker automation. Today's episode is brought you by super intelligent, every single business workflow and function is being remade and reimagine with artificial intelligence.

There is a huge chAllenge, however, of going from the potential of ai to actually capturing the value. And that gap is what super intelligence is dedicated to. Filling super intelligent accelerates AI adoption and engagement to help teams actually use A I to increase productivity and drive business value.

An interactive A I use case registry gives your company full visibility into how people are using artificial intelligence right now. Pare that with capabilities, building content in the form of tutorials, learning pats s and a use case library and super intelligence helps people inside your company show how they're getting value out of ai while providing resources for people to put that inspiration into action. The next three teams that sign up with one hundred or more seats are going to get free.

Embedded consulting. That's a process by which our super intelligence team sits with your the specific use cases that matter most to you and helps actually ensure support for adoption of those use cases to drive real value. Go to be super duty to learn more about this.

A I A ment tworog. Now back to the show. So this was everything that was rolling around this election, and yet nothing close to these domes. Day scenarios came to pass. In fact, the things that did happen, almost notable for how low impact they were.

There was a widely publicized biden deep fake robot call that was placed to thousands of voters in new hampshire january on the eve of the presidential primary, and ad generated version to bite and urge democrats to stay home instead voting, basically saying, save your vote for the real election. That incident attracted national attention, was quickly investigated in the culprit, identified the fcc, imposed a million dollar fine on the robot call provider, and proposed six million dolfin for the individual response. Hilariously, the person implicated that the entire incident hadn't been an attempt influence the primary, but rather are stunned to raise awareness about political defects.

If so, kudos. Because the amount of coverage, relatively, the amount of impact has been enormous. Beyond that, there's just been very little.

We haven't seen armies of AI power botts overrun social media, a phenomenon which arguably played a larger role in. We haven't seen scores of deep fake videos s embarrassing candidates. sure.

There were a few fake celebrity endorsements created with the eye. A generated image of felt in john wearing a pink Maggie jacket got attention for a little while. And maybe the biggest was when Donald trump himself reposted a bunch of A I generated images of women wearing swifts for trump shirts on his truth social network.

But that is ultimately prompted Taylor swift t to formally endorse the Harris campaign in order to fight them as information. And while some of those images were vegal believable, the more common use of A I during campaign has been in the form of political tire. There have been, of course, images and videos of Harrison trumpet and romantics and ariosto.

Clearly A I generated video of elon musk, Donald m dancing in the streets, trump as a pitzer g stealer. And of course, it's pretty hard to argue that these are actually meant tim st. Lead anyone.

Now we did more recently get a more serious version of the same category when on sunday, a maga affiliated account posted a video of Martin luther king junior endorsing trump, which quickly gather ten million views. The video was immediately denounced by kings daughter who called the vile, fake, irresponsible and not at all reflective of what my father would say. But even with that, there is still a huge gulf between something being varied, to use her words, and being misleading.

In other words, there are very few people who believe ever king is still alive, and even fewer who thinks he would endorse trump. Speaking to the scandal, Rachel tobac, C, E, O, social proof security, said, we're in kind of the throat beetles at the wall moment of politics and A, I, where this intersection allows people to try new things for propaganda. I think we're going to see people try anything they can influence the election.

And yet even top back announced that this video wasn't about being believable, but rather something that could play on people's emotions, SHE said. We live in this strange world now where deep fakes are kind of used to say, but what if IT we're real and using that in a partisan way. Still, the point of all of this is that it's very hard to argue that there has been a meaningful impact on these elections from generate A I.

In their latest update from september, the office of the director of national intelligence said general AI is helping to improve, accelerate aspects of foreign fluent Operations, but thus far the office has not seen to revolutionize such Operations. The risk to U. S.

Elections from foreign AI generated content depends on the ability of foreign actors to overcome restrictions built into many A I tools and remain undetected, develop their own soph histin ted models, and strategically target and disseminate such content. They highlighted the reign actors are largely focused on sowing division on issues like immigration, drug use and abortion. The DJ confirmed that they are disrupted a russian Operation around immigration in september.

And so the question becomes, what is the reason that this thread has not materialized this year? Is IT one that agencies have just been working around the clock to counter? The effort is IT, too, that the guard rail set up by companies like dali and mid journey, which made IT harder to create defects or actually working as deterrence.

Or is IT three just still too early? Sunny gandhi, the VP of political affairs adding co justice, said, i'm sure in another year to the air models will get Better. So i'm pretty worried about what IT will look like in twenty twenty six.

And definitely, on the one hand, IT is undeniable that with Better models and brought her access to more powerful models, the threat of this information will continue. For example, although sora got a lot of people nervous, in truth, that hasn't been widely available yet and the models that are nowhere near as good as the total fidelity that would allow for a really detailed misinformation campaign. At the same time, it's hard not to read a statement like that and feel like it's just a massive moving of the goal post for someone who wants to be scared.

My base case had always been coming into the election cycle that I thought that the presence of general vi was going to make people simply more skettles al of everything right from the get go. Basically that in the era of generate A I, our assumption is going to be that we can't trust anything, if that's how IT plays out, that will radically limit A I miss information ability to convince us of things, which is a good thing. But at the same time, he also create its own consequences when no one believes anything.

Obviously, one of the defining traits of this election could be voters not accepting the result of the election. Because our trust and institutions that officials are so low right now, ultimately where island is, that the issues that we face are much more about leadership, institutions and trust in one another right now than they are about technology. IT would be naive to think that A, I couldn't exacerbate those things, make them worse.

And IT would be naive to think that as enhances capabilities come online, there won't be more threats. But I do believe that this election is a good reminder that the history on ics we sometimes find ourselves in as IT relates to the threat of generate A, I are simply a lot messier and more complicated in practice. Now of course, there is still a part of me, even as I record this at nine forty A M on election day, that wonders if I won't have to come back on here tomorrow and discuss last minute A I voter tampering or some other election day interference itself. But at the moment, IT seems pretty clear that while the next ministration might be defined by artificial intelligence, this election certainly wasn't. That's going to do for today's a ideally brief preciate you listening or watching is always and until next time, peace.