PM Narendra Modi has time and again referred to deepfakes as “one of the biggest threats facing India’s system”.
Recent usage of audio and video cloning, including the generative AI, has put everyone in doubt of the authenticity of what we see on a daily basis. In electoral politics, the same can be put to a dangerous use, and can be used to spread misinformation in an all-new effective way. You can clone the voice of any political leader, put a fresh face onto an existing video clip, and share it across social media platforms. In no time, such videos can be upgraded into a ‘deepfake’ by using some advanced tools. Certainly, the dangers of this rapidly improving generative AI are many, ahead of the upcoming elections in India.
Ahead of the Lok Sabha Elections 2024, India Today brought notice to one such platform – The Indian Deepfaker, which offers personalised political ad campaigns in packages, which cost $199 to $599.
“Using groundbreaking AI technology, lip-synching, and voice cloning, we make it possible to send audio and video messages to large audiences with their names – giving them a personalised feeling,” the promotional video stated.
It cannot go unnoticed that social media is already crowded with deepfake content, and has been targeting politicians and political parties, in order to sway voter sentiments. According to the State of Deepfakes report in 2024, India is the sixth most vulnerable country to deepfake.
“Politicians and celebrities are especially susceptible to this threat. Their extensive availability of photos, videos, and voice data in the public domain makes them prime targets,” Mayank Satnalika, the engineering lead at CloudSEK, a company specializing in contextual AI for cyber threat prediction, told India Today.
PM Narendra Modi has time and again called deepfakes “one of the biggest threats facing India’s system”. In Madhya Pradesh, two video clips of Amitabh Bachchan on 'Kaun Banega Crorepati' calling Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan a liar, surfaced online. In another one, it portrayed Congress party’s CM hopeful Kamal Nath in a positive light.
For those caught unaware, it was during the Delhi Assembly polls in 2020, when India first faced AI threats. At the time, then state BJP chief Manoj Tiwari criticised CM Arvind Kejriwal’s policies in different languages. “The accessibility and decreased cost of large scale content creation can be manipulated by bad actors looking to disrupt elections, facilitated by generative AI,” an IT company report noted.
Big political parties, who have robust funding and technology, are expected to use deepfake technology to multiply their propaganda. To curb that, Microsoft is taking measures for digital watermarks for media content, which lets users know when and by whom the content was created or edited. It will also inform if the content was generated by AI. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has also now mentioned that it would require political ads to reveal whether they used AI.
