Robocalls of President Biden already confused primary voters in New Hampshire – but measures to curb the technology could be too little too late
The AI election is here.
Already this year, a robocall generated using artificial intelligence targeted New Hampshire voters in the January primary, purporting to be President Joe Biden and telling them to stay home in what officials said could be the first attempt at using AI to interfere with a US election. The “deepfake” calls were linked to two Texas companies, Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom.
It’s not clear if the deepfake calls actually prevented voters from turning out, but that doesn’t really matter, said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of Public Citizen, a group that’s been pushing for federal and state regulation of AI’s use in politics.
There’s a shitload of selection bias at play there. When we do prepare for something and actually successfully prevent it, your brain won’t remember it for you, unless you try really hard.
So, it’s almost impossible to just figure out how well we prepare, using some kind of sniff test. Our human brains just royally suck at that specific kind of analysis.
By way of example, Biden’s recent investment into port security. If a problem never occurs now, are you going to give him a point for that, or just never really consider it again?
This is partly why the scientific method needs to be so strict, slow and rigorous to get anywhere.