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The Misinfo Election: Will it be a fake news nightmare?Generative AI has made the production of misleading content easy for anyone with the most basic of computer skills. Tom Phillips asks whether the next general election could become a fake news nightmareIt had the hallmarks of a bombshell political scandal. Just days before the recent Slovak parliamentary election, audio recordings of Michal Šimečka, the leader of the Progressive Slovakia Party, were widely shared across social media. In one clip he was heard discussing plans to rig the ballot – taking control of polling stations, and buying votes from the country’s Roma minority. In another, he said he planned to raise the price of beer. The “recordings” were, of course, fakes – and rapidly debunked ones at that. What made them notable was less the fact that they were faked, but how they were faked: with generative AI, most likely with free or cheap online tools, readily available to anybody with the inclination to cause a little chaos. Feed in a few clips of a person speaking; get out a decent approximation of their voice reading any script you want. Technologies that were theoretical a few years ago are now just a click away. For anybody not keeping tabs on Slovakian politics, the potential was soon brought much closer to home: on the eve of the Labour conference, an audio clip of “Keir Starmer” abusing his staff circulated on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Like the Slovak example, it wasn’t too hard to peg as a fake: the intonation is a bit off, and the accounts that shared it were clearly having a laugh. But also like the Slovak example, a bunch of people believed it anyway. Conservative MP Simon Clarke was moved to brand the technology “a new threat to democracy”.
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