In India and In Indonesia, dead leaders are rising to support their political successors; rapper Eminem supports opposition parties in South Africa; and in the United States, President Biden is telling New Hampshire voters to stay home. All of these things “happened,” but none of them are real. The generative AI revolution is here and it is coming for your choices. Welcome to the future, welcome to 2024.
For the first time, the widespread availability of generative AI will collide head-on with political campaigns and elections. 2024 is already an unprecedented year for democracy: more than 2 billion people (the largest number ever recorded) will vote in national, local and regional elections in more than 60 countries.
The global electorate now has to deal with this new technology. Deepfakes can be used for everything from sabotage to satire to the seemingly mundane: we’ve already seen AI chatbots write speeches and answer questions about a candidate’s politics. But we’ve also seen AI used to humiliate female politicians and make world leaders appear to promote the pleasures of passive income scams. AI has been used to deploy bots and even tailor automated texts to voters.
Experts know that generative AI is poised to dramatically change the information landscape, but we’re still learning how exactly that will happen. Problems that have long plagued tech platforms, such as misinformation and disinformation, fraudulent or hateful content, are likely to amplify, despite the barriers the companies say they have put in place.
So to get a real sense of how generative AI is entering and changing the political and information landscape, we’ll be following it around the world for the rest of the year.
This is what we are doing:
The list and map you see here will be updated continuously throughout 2024. On the map, you will be able to see each country where we have identified a use of generative AI in their elections, and how many times. On the cards you can learn more about each specific case, including when it happened and what it was. In addition to the information you see in each example, we’ll also track the companies, tools, and platforms involved.