Online disinformation operations bent on disrupting US elections aren’t a new thing. Hillary Clinton had to deal with Russia’s internet-based attempts to attack and discredit her when she ran for president back in 2016.
But a lot has changed in the years since. Foreign adversaries, including Russia, are still targeting American candidates, as well as the US system of democracy as a whole, but now they have the power of artificial intelligence to make their campaigns bigger, more sophisticated and more convincing than ever before.
The advancement of artificial intelligence over the past several years has made it easier for people to generate convincing phishing emails and deepfakes. As AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot compete for market share, they’re continually developing new capabilities, all of which come with the risk of abuse.
“I think that anybody who’s not worried is not paying attention,” said Clinton, who served as secretary of state and a US senator before her presidential run.
Clinton made the comments during a panel at an event looking at AI’s impact on 2024 global elections held Thursday at Columbia University in New York City. It was jointly sponsored by the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and Aspen Digital.Â
During the event, Clinton and other panelists spoke about the need for government and tech companies, especially those in social media, to work together to combat the spread of disinformation and misinfomation.
Election security has been a major topic for the past two presidential elections. Much was made during the 2016 election about the possibility that a foreign government, such as Russia’s, could “hack” the election, either changing results and winners without anyone knowing or changing them to be so obviously improbable that it would destroy trust in the system.
But little evidence of meddling was found, and over the next four years many states that…
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