India is the world’s most populous democracy, and there has been a lot going on related to religion that is well beyond the scope of this, but deserves mention because violence has been involved.
The Meta Question.
In the latest news, Meta stands accused of approving political ads on it’s platforms of Instagram and Facebook that have incited violence.
This, apparently, was a test, according to TheGuardian.
How this happened seems a little strange and is noteworthy1:
“…The adverts were created and submitted to Meta’s ad library – the database of all adverts on Facebook and Instagram – by India Civil Watch International (ICWI) and Ekō, a corporate accountability organisation, to test Meta’s mechanisms for detecting and blocking political content that could prove inflammatory or harmful during India’s six-week election…”
Revealed: Meta approved political ads in India that incited violence, Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, TheGuardian, 20 May 2024.
It’s hard to judge the veracity of the claim based on what I dug up (see the footnote). TheGuardian must have more from their sources for them to be willing to publish the piece – I have not seen this before with them – so I’ll assume good and see how this pans out.
Meta claims to be making efforts to minimize false information, but Meta also doesn’t have a great track record.
The Deepfake Industry of India.
Wired.com also has a story that has some investigation in it that does not relate to Meta.
“Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve“2 by Wired.com goes into great detail about Divyendra Singh Jadoun and how his business is doing well.
“…Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities. While the US recently made it illegal to use AI-generated voices for unsolicited calls, in India sanctioned deepfakes have become a $60 million business opportunity. More than 50 million AI-generated voice clone calls were made in the two months leading up to the start of the elections in April—and millions more will be made during voting, one of the country’s largest business messaging operators told WIRED.
“Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve“, Nilesh Christopher & Varsha Bansal, Wired.com, 20 May 2024.
Jadoun is the poster boy of this burgeoning industry. His firm, Polymath Synthetic Media Solutions, is one of many deepfake service providers from across India that have emerged to cater to the political class. This election season, Jadoun has delivered five AI campaigns so far, for which his company has been paid a total of $55,000. (He charges significantly less than the big political consultants—125,000 rupees [$1,500] to make a digital avatar, and 60,000 rupees [$720] for an audio clone.) He’s made deepfakes for Prem Singh Tamang, the chief minister of the Himalayan state of Sikkim, and resurrected Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, an iconic politician who died in a helicopter crash in 2009, to endorse his son Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, currently chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Jadoun has also created AI-generated propaganda songs for several politicians, including Tamang, a local candidate for parliament, and the chief minister of the western state of Maharashtra. “He is our pride,” ran one song in Hindi about a local politician in Ajmer, with male and female voices set to a peppy tune. “He’s always been impartial.”…”
Al Jazeera has a video on this as well.
In the broader way it is being used, audio deepfakes have people really believing that they were called personally by candidates. This has taken robo-calling to a whole new level3.
What we are seeing is the manipulation of opinions in a democracy through AI, and it’s something that while happening in India now is certainly worth being worried about in other nations. Banning something in one country, or making it illegal, does not mean that foreign actors won’t do it where the laws have no hold.
Given India’s increasing visible stance in the world, we should be concerned, but given AI’s increasing visibility in global politics to shape opinions, we should be very worried indeed. This is just what we see. What we don’t see is the data collected from a lot of services, and how they can be used to decide who is most vulnerable to particular types of manipulation, and what that means.
We’ve built a shotgun from instructions on the Internet and have now loaded it and pointed it at the feet of our democracies.
- Digging into the referenced report itself (PDF), there’s no ownership of the report itself within the document, though it is on the Eko.org web server – with no links to it from the site itself at the time of this writing. There’s nothing on the India Civil Watch International (ICWI) website at the time of this writing either.
That’s pretty strange. The preceding report referenced in the article is here on LondonStory.org. Neither the ICWI or Eko websites seem to have that either. Having worked with some NGOs in the Caribbean and Latin America, I know that they are sometimes slow to update websites, so we’ll stick a pin in it. ↩︎ - Likely paywalled if you’re not a Wired.com subscriber, and no quotes would do it justice. Links to references provided. ↩︎
- I worked for a company that was built on robocalling, but went to higher ground with telephony by doing emergency communications instead, so it is not hard for me to imagine how AI can be integrated into it. ↩︎