Political deepfakes are spreading like wildfire thanks to GenAI

This year, billions of people will vote in elections around the world. We will see — and have seen — high-stakes races in more than 50 countries, from Russia and Taiwan to India and El Salvador.

Demagogic candidates — and looming geopolitical threats — would test even the most robust democracies in any normal year. But this isn’t a normal year; AI-generated disinformation and misinformation is flooding the channels at a rate never before witnessed.

And little’s being done about it.

In a newly published study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British nonprofit dedicated to fighting hate speech and extremism online, the co-authors find that the volume of AI-generated disinformation — specifically deepfake images pertaining to elections — has been rising by an average of 130% per month on X (formerly Twitter) over the past year.

The study didn’t look at the proliferation of election-related deepfakes on other social media platforms, like Facebook or TikTok. But Callum Hood, head of research at the CCDH, said the results indicate that the availability of free, easily jailbroken AI tools — along with inadequate social media moderation — is contributing to a deepfakes crisis.

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