philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Did artificial intelligence shape the 2024 US election?

... But the anticipated avalanche of AI-driven misinformation never materialised. As Election Day came and went, viral misinformation played a starring role, misleading about vote counting, mail-in ballots and voting machines. However, this chicanery leaned largely on old, familiar techniques, including text-based social media claims and video or out-of-context images. ...

The AI-generated claims that got the most traction supported existing narratives rather than fabricating new claims to fool people, experts said. For example, after former President Donald Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, falsely claimed that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, AI images and memes depicting animal abuse flooded the internet. ...

“In this election, AI’s impact may appear muted because traditional formats were still more effective, and on social network-based platforms like Instagram, accounts with large followings use AI less,” said Herbert Chang, assistant professor of quantitative social science at Dartmouth College. Chang co-wrote a study that found AI-generated images “generate less virality than traditional memes,” but memes created with AI also generate virality. ...

Prominent people with large followings easily spread messages without needing AI-generated media. Trump, for example, repeatedly falsely said in speeches, media interviews and on social media that illegal immigrants were being brought into the US to vote even though cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare and citizenship is required for voting in federal elections. Polling showed Trump’s repeated claim paid off: More than half of Americans in October said they were concerned about noncitizens voting in the 2024 election. ...

In other cases, politicians flipped the script — blaming or disparaging AI instead of using it. Trump, for example, falsely claimed that a montage of his gaffes that the Lincoln Project released was AI-generated, and he said a crowd of Harris supporters was AI-generated.  ...

The majority of the deepfake incidents were created as satire, the data showed. Behind that were deepfakes that intended to harm someone’s reputation. And the third most common deepfake was created for entertainment. ...

See the full story here; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/25/did-artificial-intelligence-shape-the-2024-us-election