Political campaign ads and donor solicitations have long been deceptive. In 2004, for example, U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry, a Democrat, aired an ad stating that Republican opponent George W. Bush “says sending jobs overseas ‘makes sense’ for America.”
Bush never said such a thing.
The next day Bush responded by releasing an ad saying Kerry “supported higher taxes over 350 times.” This too was a false claim.
These days, the internet has gone wild with deceptive political ads. Ads often pose as polls and have misleading clickbait headlines.
Campaign fundraising solicitations are also rife with deception. An analysis of 317,366 political emails sent during the 2020 election in the U.S. found that deception was the norm. For example, a campaign manipulates recipients into opening the emails by lying about the sender’s identity and using subject lines that trick the recipient into thinking the sender is replying to the donor, or claims the email is “NOT asking for money” but then asks for money. Both Republicans and Democrats do it.
Campaigns are now rapidly embracing artificial intelligence for composing and producing ads and donor solicitations. The results are impressive: Democratic campaigns found that donor letters written by AI were more effective than letters written by humans at writing personalized text that persuades recipients to click and send donations.
A pro-Ron DeSantis super PAC featured an AI-generated imitation of Donald Trump’s voice in this ad.
And AI has benefits for democracy, such as helping staffers organize their emails from constituents or helping government officials summarize testimony.
But there are fears that AI will make politics more deceptive than ever.
Here are six things to look out for. I base this list on my own experiments testing the effects of political deception. I hope that voters can be equipped with what to expect and what to watch out for, and learn to be more skeptical, as the U.S. heads into the next presidential campaign.
Bogus custom campaign promises
My research on the 2020 presidential election revealed that the choice voters made between Biden and Trump was driven by their perceptions of which candidate “proposes realistic solutions to problems” and “says out loud what I am thinking,” based on 75 items in a survey. These are two of the most important qualities for a candidate to have to project a presidential image and win.
AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT by OpenAI, Bing Chat by Microsoft, and Bard by Google, could be used by politicians to generate customized campaign promises deceptively microtargeting voters and donors.
Currently, when people scroll through news feeds, the articles are logged in their computer history, which are tracked by sites such as Facebook. The user is tagged as liberal or conservative, and also tagged as holding certain interests. Political…
