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The use of artificial intelligence by foreign governments to spread disinformation could threaten this year’s presidential election, according to Hillary Clinton, who said the methods used against her 2016 presidential campaign were “primitive” compared to today’s technology.
“Anybody who’s not worried is not paying attention,” Clinton, also a former senator and secretary of state, told an audience Thursday at Columbia University during a discussion between election officials and technology executives on AI and global elections, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“It could only be a very small handful of people in St. Petersburg or Moldova or wherever they are right now who are lighting the fire, but because of the algorithms everyone gets burned,” she added.
Clinton said Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to undermine her 2016 campaign by spreading disinformation on social media about “all these terrible things” about her, and that she doesn’t think “any of us understood it.”
“I did not understand it,” she said. “I can tell you my campaign did not understand it. The so-called dark web was filled with these kinds of memes and stories and videos of all sorts portraying me in all kinds of less-than-flattering ways. What they did to me was primitive and what we’re talking about now is the leap in technology.”
Russia has denied interfering in the 2016 election, but a bipartisan Senate report said acts were taken to help elect Donald Trump as president.
The current election cycle marks the first in which officials are preparing to respond to the threat posed through AI, which can be used to spread videos, images, and more that can interfere with the election, including misinforming voters on where to cast ballots.
Election officials at the Columbia meeting said they are concerned about deepfake videos that could lead people to believe false information.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said the “lies will be turbocharged” through the use of AI.
There is no federal law against AI-generated content being used to influence voters, but Michigan, along with a few other states, have passed laws limiting the use of the technology.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under President George W. Bush, said he thinks people can make videos with AI to discredit the election system, potentially leading to “another January 6th.”
AI-generated disinformation already came to play this election cycle, with a robocall with a voice sounding like President Joe Biden’s telling New Hampshire voters not to cast ballots.
The state attorney general’s office later traced the origin of the call to a company based in Texas and issued a cease-and-desist order.
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission banned voices generated through AI from being used in unsolicited robocalls.
Meanwhile, several major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, signed a pledge last month to prevent the creation and spread of AI-created disinformation in elections but did not commit to banning the content.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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