Voters can no longer believe what they see and can’t assume the message in their inboxes or social media feeds are legitimate, according to one of Canada’s top tech experts.
Carmi Levy told Vista Radio in an interview there isn’t a sector anywhere that is immune to the encroachment of AI and it would be naïve to think politics would escape its spread.
“The sad reality is we are seeing more and more AI being incorporated into political messaging up to and including the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation and deep fakes.
“The use of synthetic assets within political advertising and the use of social media for non-legitimate content is designed to sway political opinion.”
Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act has no provisions addressing AI-generated content, synthetic media, or deepfakes in campaign advertising.
Levy said it’s pretty much a buyer beware and voter beware scenario, where we literally have to mistrust at first glance what we see and consume until it is proven otherwise. He also admitted it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between something legitimate and something AI generated.
He says we need to look for the origins of an asset.
“When you receive a message that is politically motivated and you want to look at who sent it, is it a recently created account? Does it use original assets or were these assets scraped off existing accounts?”
He said legitimate accounts have a years-long footprint and others will post and react on the content, whereas fake accounts show none of those signs.
Levy added humanity is very difficult to recreate in a human space and with a little bit of investigation it is easy to determine all is not what it seems.
He also offered some advice to eager voters.
“Verify before you engage. Make sure you are certain it is in fact a legitimate account, human, and political candidate before you decide to engage with them.”
Some municipal candidates are not overly savvy in the ways of IT but Levy said everyone on a ballot needs to keep their eyes wide open for bad actors in the race who will use digital tools against their opponents.
“Make sure you are scanning social media platforms for signs your content is being lifted and misused. In many cases we have seen ghost accounts created by political opponents made to look like the original one but spewing content that increases the likelihood of them being perceived in a negative manner.”
He added candidates need to keep an eye out to make sure they are not being targeted.
