AI Threatens Democracy, Again

Much has been written about AI and how it is used by unscrupulous individuals to generate all sorts of content for all sorts of purposes. 

These days they include military ones too.

With two major wars raging on in Europe and the Middle East, the question of AI content is elevated to a whole new level. More so since it is used by the HAMAS terrorist group to spread fake content on social media.

Such as the picture below which was debunked by experts in the field. 

David May, a research manager at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital that “Hamas and other Palestinian factions have already passed off gruesome images from other conflicts as though they were Palestinian victims of Israeli assaults, so this is not something unique to this theater of operations.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Tal Pavel, founder and director of CyBureau, an Israeli-based institute for the study of cyber policy, described it as “upgraded fake news." 

"We already know the term fake news, which in most cases is visual or written content that is manipulated or placed in a false context. AI, or deepfake, is when we take those images and bring them to life in video clips,” he said.

Pavel added that the  emergence of AI-generated deepfake visuals is "one of the biggest threats to democracy."

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also been subject to AI manipulation. 

In March 2022, a fake AI-based video of him appearing to urge his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russia was posted on social media and shared by Ukrainian news. It was quickly taken down and was generally of very low quality (see the picture below).

This is not the first time AI-generated content causes outcry. This was also the case when Amnesty International shared a fake picture of protests in Bolivia even though there exist many pictures of the police.

GNcrypto has covered an array of AI-related topics. Recently, we shed light on how AI extracts sounds from photos.