Lea Feiger: Sometimes you can link it to specific companies.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah.
Lea Feiger: Generative AI itself is doing that.
Vittoria Elliott: Yes, totally. For example, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was imprisoned on corruption charges, was heavily forged. His party was disqualified from standing in the general election earlier this year. He was able to deliver campaign speeches using generative AI.
Lea Feiger: Wild.
Vittoria Elliott: To do this, they used ElevenLabs, which is the same company that was used for the fake Joe Biden robocall earlier this year. Sometimes we know the companies involved, many times we don’t.
Lea Feiger: How have these companies said they are going to approach this year’s elections?
Vittoria Elliott: Well, more legitimate companies like Midjourney and ChatGPT, OpenAI, Google, etc., have said, “We’re going to put up barriers. We’re not going to allow political images to be generated.” ChatGPT, which is text-based, they said, “It’s not okay to use our tool to generate political material for campaigns” or whatever, “You can’t run a chatbot on top of our interface,” basically. But they are not doing a very good job of imposing it. There was a report from the Center to Counter Digital Hate that we covered in March, where they went into all these image generators and said, “Give us an image of Trump doing this, give us an image of Biden doing this.” “And he did it many times. For ChatGPT, Dean Phillips, a congressman who briefly ran for president.
Lea Feiger: Former presidential candidate, Congressman Dean Phillips.
Vittoria Elliott: He built a chatbot called Dean.bot on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface and it wasn’t taken down until the press said, “Hey, isn’t this against your policies?”
Lea Feiger: I remember that very well. Something I also remember from that time is that Dean Phillips actually had a lot of Silicon Valley backers. He feels a little confused. It’s like, “Yeah, you shouldn’t use Dean.bot, but we still love and support you.” There is a strange coming and going there. Sam Altman agreed with what Dean, for example, said about generative AI and legislation against it.
Vittoria Elliott: Yes. That’s just in the US. For example, in Indonesia, there was a company that created an app called Pemilu for the Indonesian elections. The founder of that app claimed that they had built something on ChatGPT that allowed them to write campaign speeches in multiple local languages.
Lea Feiger: Wow.
Vittoria Elliott: It was about getting information that would allow them to tailor messages to particular demographic groups, whether they were young people, women, whatever.
Lea Feiger: Well, we’re talking about cash when you have a country with so many languages.
Vittoria Elliott: Yes. It is scattered on islands, with different needs.