Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already been used to disrupt elections around the world - and there are fears among senior politicians and the security services that the UK will be next.
Former Justice Secretary Sir Robert Buckland is urging the government to do more to tackle what he sees as a “clear and present danger” to UK democracy. The Conservative MP, who now chairs the Northern Ireland select committee, is particularly concerned about the rise of deepfakes - realistic audio and video clips of politicians appearing to say things they did not say.
The threat posed to democracy by AI-generated misinformation does not belong to some dystopian vision of the future, he argues. “The future is here. It’s happening. Unless the policymakers [in the UK] are showing some leadership on the need for a strong and effective domestic set of guardrails - plus international work - then we are going to be behind the curve.”
The UK government says it is taking steps to protect elections from foreign interference, through a Defending Democracy Taskforce launched last year and chaired by Home Office Security Minister Tom Tugendhat.
Misinformation and dirty tricks have long been a feature of election campaigns around the world. Photoshopped images and memes - and even doctored audio of politicians - have been around for decades. What is new, as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - an arm of GCHQ - pointed out in its annual report, is the easy availability of powerful, generative AI tools, which can be used to create convincing fakes.
The boom in large language models, such as ChatGPT, and text-to-speech, or text-to-video, software, is seen by some as a gift to those bent on disrupting elections, from bedroom-based mischief makers to malicious state actors.
AI-generated images and audio have been a factor in other recent elections and referendums around the world, including Argentina, which saw right-wing libertarian Javier Milei emerge victorious.
If social media is flooded with synthetic images and text - even if it is clearly labelled as such - some experts fear voters could reach the point where where they no longer know what is real or not. In such an environment, unscrupulous politicians may find it easier to call fake things that are real - what researchers have called the “liar’s dividend”. (1)
(1) A gift for Trump and his gullible mugs … 
