Leah Feiger: Sometimes you are able to link it back to specific companies-
Vittoria Elliott: Yes.
Leah Feiger: That are doing the generative AI itself.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, totally. For instance, there was a deep fake made of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, whose been in jail under corruption charges. His party was disqualified for running in the general election earlier this year. He was able to make campaign speeches using generative AI.
Leah Feiger: Wild.
Vittoria Elliott: To do that, they used ElevenLabs, which is the same company that was used for the fake Joe Biden robocall earlier this year. Sometimes we do know the companies involved, a lot of times we don’t.
Leah Feiger: How have these companies said that they’re going to approach elections this year?
Vittoria Elliott: Well, more legitimate companies like Midjourney and ChatGPT, OpenAI, Google, et cetera, they’ve said, “We’re going to put guardrails on. We’re not going to allow for generating political images.” ChatGPT, which is text based, they’ve said, “It’s not cool to use our tool to generate political stuff for campaigns,” or whatever, “You can’t run a chatbot on top of our interface,” basically. But they’re not doing great an enforcing it. There was a report from the Center For Countering Digital Hate that we covered in March, where they went into all these images generators and they were just like, “Give us an image of Trump doing this, give us an image of Biden doing this.” And it did it a lot of the time. For ChatGPT, Dean Phillips, who was a congressman who was briefly running for President.
Leah Feiger: Formerly running for President, Congressman Dean Phillips.
Vittoria Elliott: Built a chatbot called Dean.bot on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface and it didn’t get taken down until the press was like, “Hey, isn’t this against your policies?”
Leah Feiger: I remember that very well. Something that I also remember from that moment is that Dean Phillips actually had a lot of Silicon Valley backers. It feels a little bit hazy. It’s like, “Yes, you shouldn’t use Dean.bot, but also we still kind of love and support you.” There’s a weird back-and-forth there. The stuff that Dean, for example, was saying about generative AI and legislating against it, Sam Altman was into it.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. That’s just in the US. For instance, in Indonesia, there was a company that built an app called Pemilu for the Indonesian elections. The founder of that app claimed that they had built something on top of ChatGPT that allowed them to write campaign speeches in a bunch of local languages.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Vittoria Elliott: That was pulling in information to allow them to tailor messages to particular demographics, whether that was young people, women, whatever.
Leah Feiger: Well, talk about effective when you have a country with so many languages.
Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. It’s dispersed across of islands, different needs.