Analysts Warn of AI Disinformation in Record Election Year
Taiwan was one of the first countries to go to the polls in a historic year for elections worldwide. Amid a growing threat of artificial intelligence-enabled disinformation, analysts warn this could be a major test for democracies.
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00:00 "We want to vote."
00:03 2024 will be a historic year for elections worldwide,
00:07 a major test for democracy amid a growing threat of disinformation
00:12 driven by generative artificial intelligence.
00:15 "The dust is settling in Taiwan,
00:19 one of the first of at least 40 countries and territories
00:23 to elect new leaders this year.
00:25 But researchers say in the lead-up to the elections here,
00:28 Taiwan saw more sophisticated and aggressive attempts by Beijing
00:32 to undermine its democratic system,
00:35 with more online bots parroting Chinese Communist Party narratives.
00:39 "Taiwan is number one in terms of foreign government
00:42 dissemination of false information, number one,
00:45 11 years in a row."
00:47 Foreign interference in domestic elections is not new.
00:51 One of the first examples was in World War II,
00:54 when Britain used wiretaps and made-up news stories
00:57 to try and sway the U.S. presidential election in their favor.
01:01 76 years later, a more serious case.
01:04 The 2016 White House race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
01:08 saw a boom in automated bots,
01:11 spreading fake information on social media like digital wildfire,
01:15 something that could get worse with increasingly savvy AI.
01:19 "It has the potential to flood the zone with all kinds of crap.
01:25 AI more generally can act as a way of dividing people
01:28 so that they all believe what they want
01:31 and they don't have any common ground on which to base a solution."
01:35 Trust in democracy has also taken hits,
01:38 like baseless claims of election fraud,
01:40 sometimes amplified by candidates themselves.
01:43 Analysts are concerned that such divided societies
01:46 make for a fertile breeding ground for AI to cause damage.
01:50 "The worst case would be several disputed elections,
01:55 where it's very, very just unclear to anyone outside who won it,
02:01 because there was some kind of last-minute wave of misinformation
02:07 or hacked and released data."
02:10 With the fate of major powers and global order on the line,
02:13 some analysts say social media companies
02:16 need to take responsibility for disinformation
02:19 to weed out harmful bot activity.
02:21 But such self-governance hasn't happened yet,
02:24 leaving voters to their own devices
02:26 to exercise their judgment in deciding what's real and what's not.
02:30 Yixin Chen and Joyce Sun for Taiwan Plus.
02:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]