Californians want lawmakers to safeguard elections from artificial intelligence
Consensus is rare, but nearly all Californians agree on stopping AI and disinformation’s potentially disastrous impact on upcoming elections. This should be a wakeup call for the California Legislature.
Since 2020, voters in California and beyond have seen disinformation proliferate and poison our politics more than ever before. Generative artificial intelligence has the power to rapidly intensify this trend for the worse.
After all, we’re one year away from another enormously consequential presidential election.
With current AI tools, it doesn’t take much effort to make a fake audio recording of Joe Biden saying anything you want. Imagine if a robocall from “Joe Biden” shared false information about polling place changes with hundreds of thousands of voters on the eve of the next election.
Or imagine a conspiracy theorist making a fake video of an elections official “caught on tape” admitting that their voting machines can be hacked, and then publishing it to a fake news site populated with otherwise regular content and engineered to look like a local newspaper. New AI tools can make all of this, easily.