Comment: Election officials have to be ready for threat of AI
By Krystyna Sikora, David Levine and Lindsay Gorman / For The Fulcrum
Days before New Hampshire’s presidential primary, up to 25,000 Granite State voters received a mysterious call from “President Joe Biden.” He urged Democrats not to vote in the primary because it “only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump.” But Biden never said this. The recording was a digital fabrication generated by artificial intelligence.
This robocall incident — traced to a supporter of a Democratic challenger to Biden — is the highest-profile example of how AI could be weaponized to both disrupt and undermine this year’s presidential election, but it is merely a glimpse of the challenges election officials will confront. Election workers must be well-equipped to counter AI threats to ensure the integrity of this year’s election; and our organization, the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, published a handbook to help them understand and defend against threats supercharged by AI.
Generative AI tools allow users to clone audio of anyone’s voice (saying nearly anything), produce photo-realistic images of anybody (doing nearly anything), and automate human-like writing without spelling errors or grammatical mistakes (in nearly any language). The widespread accessibility of these tools offers malign actors at home and abroad a new, low-cost weapon to launch sophisticated phishing attacks targeting election workers or to flood social media platforms with false or manipulated information that looks real. These tactics do not even need to be successful to sow discord; the mere perception that an attack occurred could cause widespread damage to Americans’ trust in the election.
These advancements come at a time when trust in U.S. elections is already alarmingly low. Less than half of Americans express substantial confidence that the votes in the 2024 presidential election will be counted accurately, with particular distrust among Republican voters. On top of that, election workers continue to face harassment, high-turnover, and onerous working environments often stemming from lies about election subterfuge. In an age of AI-driven manipulated information, the ability to readily fabricate images, audio and video to support election denialist narratives risks lending credence to — or at least creating further confusion around — such claims and inspiring real-world action that undermines elections.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-election-officials-have-to-be-ready-for-threat-of-ai/
