The 2024 US presidential election season has begun Attack ads are created 100% by artificial intelligence.
The ad imagines a future dystopia where President Joe Biden remains in office beyond next year’s results.
Images, sounds and videos are stunningly realistic and created with widely available AI tools.
And they predict an election season where AI can be used by all parties and actors to create hyper-realistic synthetic content at scale.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the US and Europe signaled this week that they are taking more aggressive action to regulate artificial intelligence.
In the US, four major federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, issued a joint statement on their stance on artificial intelligence companies. The agencies have clarified that they will not deal with artificial intelligence companies from other companies when implementing the rules and regulations.
In Europe, the European Parliament has agreed to move forward on the world’s first AI regulation, the Artificial Intelligence Act. This is a broad set of regulations that will govern the use of AI in the European Union. These include safeguards against abuse of these systems and rules that protect citizens from the risks of artificial intelligence.
How can we prepare and do business for this new political normal?
I spoke with Paul Retzer, founder/CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, on episode 45 of the Marketing AI Show to find out.
- Advertising itself is not a problem…“Advertising itself isn’t crazy,” says Retzer. There wasn’t some breakthrough to make it all possible. It was created by the intelligence that exists today. And that’s the problem.
- The problem is that AI can now create synthetic content at scale. This is not a new feature. And propaganda is not a new problem, says Retzer. But we’ve never had the ability to create fake content at this level of realism or scale before. And this is just the beginning.
- Expect AI to be used to create fake content in every campaign moving forward. “The most advanced technology will be used in these campaigns,” says Roetzer. This is just the beginning.
- And the consequences of this will be borne by the general society. “My biggest concern is that the average US citizen has no idea that AI can do this,” Retzer says. Most people will not know that extremely realistic content can be faked. “I feel like we’re going to see the best and the worst of what AI can do all at once over the next 16 or 17 months,” he says.
- Don’t expect lawmakers to step in… No one is going to seriously regulate the use of artificial intelligence in political campaigns because the people who have the power to regulate it will use it to get elected, Reutzer says. These tools can be used by anyone to create an almost infinite amount of fake content, including an army of people working on campaigns.
- And don’t expect general regulations to be followed. In the United States, the joint announcement by four federal agencies is still largely cosmetic, Retzer said. “It’s this kind of broad blanket statement that doesn’t really have anything tactical behind it.”
Bottom line: We’re about to face a political train wreck when it comes to fake AI-generated content, and we need to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction.
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