No, Taylor Swift does not endorse Donald Trump. Yes, the huge crowds that turned out at Kamala Harris rallies were real. Do you agree?
Whether you agree or not, the very fact that it’s being questioned indicates that we’re all in the midst of an ongoing AI election nightmare, with examples of AI-generated disinformation relating to the 2024 election piling up quickly.
Last week, Donald Trump falsely claimed that photos of large crowds at Kamala Harris rallies were generated by AI, and two days ago, Trump shared several images on Truth Social implying that Taylor Swift was endorsing him, some of which were clearly generated by AI. There was also news that Iranian groups were using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate divisive content related to the US elections, and that Elon Musk’s Grok AI model on X was spitting out false information about voting.
Following the widespread falsehoods seen after the 2016 and 2020 elections, the chaos that generative AI will wreak this election season has been predicted before: Last December, Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, told me that AI would wreak “major chaos” on the 2024 election.
It certainly seems that way to me, and as Kamala Harris prepares to accept the Democratic nomination, I’ve been astonished to see voices questioning whether the crowds at the Democratic National Convention and Trump rallies were real or AI-generated. The Washington Post As reported yesterday, many AI fakes aren’t necessarily intended to fool anyone, but may simply be powerful, provocative memes intended to provoke, humiliate, or elicit a cheap laugh that pleases a candidate’s supporters.
Either way, it feels like an insidious march towards mass self-doubt about what’s real and what’s not. I myself find myself beginning to question what I’m seeing, assuming it’s all AI-generated or frantically scanning photos for clues.
But things could get even worse. What about real-time, live deepfake video? A tool called Deep-Fake-Cam has been trending on X over the past two weeks. Using a single image of Elon Musk, for example, a developer was able to replace their own face with Musk’s and broadcast a high-quality live video as the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Combined with one of the easy-to-use AI voice clones currently available, this kind of technology could bring a new level of opportunity to deepfakes.
“I’ve seen a lot of deepfake technology, but this is kind of scary,” said Ariel Herbert Voss, founder of Rancivir and a former security research scientist at OpenAI, adding that deepfake cameras are “photoinvariant,” meaning the AI-generated images retain their “signatures” even as light moves around the image. That makes them “harder to detect in the moment,” he said. luck.
Nor can we expect much support from the platforms on which these images and videos are shared. Social media companies have “drastically scaled back” their election integrity departments, according to a panel hosted in Chicago yesterday by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. As a result, the panel warned, we will see a proliferation of AI-generated media, or deep fakes, before and after the 2024 election.
“It’s only August, what’s going to happen in December?” said Adam Powell III, executive director of the USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative.
With federal AI regulation on hold until after the election, it seems there’s little we can do except wait and hope we wake up from this AI election nightmare.
Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
Sharon Goldman
AI in the News
Another week, another AI copyright lawsuit. According to ReutersThe three authors filed suit yesterday in California federal court against the AI model development company Anthropic. They say the company The company trained its AI-powered chatbot, “Claude,” using its own books and hundreds of thousands of others’ books. The plaintiffs, authors and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, claim that Anthropic “used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human instructions.” This follows other lawsuits filed by authors against generative AI companies. By 11 non-fiction writers In December, OpenAI and Microsoft Submitted More than a dozen authors, including John Grisham, plan to file a lawsuit against OpenAI in September 2023.
Chip giant AMD acquires ZT Systems to compete with Nvidia. Yesterday, AMD announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire ZT Systems, a company that provides AI infrastructure to major tech companies, for $4.9 billion. AxiosThis “shows how far ahead rival Nvidia is in AI technology infrastructure.” Artificial intelligence requires more than just chips: it also needs the right software and networking. AMD’s latest bid for ZT Systems “is a kind of admission that the company is weak here.”
The debate over California’s AI bill. California Governor Gavin Newsom has yet to publicly take a stance on the state’s landmark AI bill, SB-1047, but that hasn’t stopped others from speaking out. Representative Nancy Pelosi said the bill is “Ignorant“We must enact model legislation that gives the country the opportunity and responsibility to give the edge to small entrepreneurs and academic institutions, not to big tech companies,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, who introduced the bill, according to TechCrunch. In his own words In response, he said he had “a great deal of respect” for Pelosi, but added, “While I respect what Ms. Pelosi has said, I strongly disagree.”
LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault’s family office begins scouting for AI startups. According to CNBCLVMH founder and CEO Bernard Arnault has made a series of artificial intelligence investments this year through his family office, Aglaé Ventures. According to family office database Fintrx, the largest funding round this year was in a French startup called H, formerly known as Holistic AI, which aims to create “full general artificial intelligence.” Fintrx said the total funding rounds in AI companies has exceeded $300 million.
The fate of AI
Alphabet’s robotaxi service hits new milestone as ridership doubles in just a few months Jessica Matthews
TSMC’s first European factory gives EU semiconductor ambitions a boost, but Intel’s big decision yet to be made —David Meyer
These boom-and-bust technology cycles show that AI investments will rebound quickly if they decline. —Jeff Grabow (Commentary)
Number of Fortune 500 companies warning about AI risks increases by 473.5% —Jason Marr
Women are using ChatGPT to catch men who lie about their height on dating apps — Sydney Lake
AI Calendar
August 28: NVIDIA Revenues
September 10-11: AI Conference, San Francisco
September 10-12: AI Hardware and AI Edge Summit, San Jose, CA
September 17-19: Dreamforce, San Francisco
September 25-26: Meta Connect, Menlo Park, California.
October 22-23: TedAI, San Francisco
October 28-30: Voice & AI, Arlington, VA.
November 19-22: Microsoft Ignite, Chicago, IL.
December 2-6: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas, NV.
December 8-12: Neural Information Processing Systems (Neurips) 2024 Vancouver, British Columbia
December 9-10: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco (registered) here)
Focus on AI research
Breakthrough advances in AI-powered weather forecasting during hurricane season. NVIDIA Announced New research uses AI to predict extreme weather events and improve short-term weather forecasts. Nvidia claims that its new generative AI model, Stormcast, demonstrates better simulation of kilometre-scale extreme weather events. AxiosTo date, AI weather and climate models from researchers at Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and others have demonstrated progress using AI and machine learning to produce medium-range global weather forecasts that rival or surpass traditional physics-based models running on supercomputers. In addition to more accurate forecasts, the new models could help scientists apply global climate change projections more precisely to regional scales. ““We’re now confident that AI can compete with physics at predicting storm scale,” study co-author Mike Pritchard, a climate scientist at Nvidia, told Axios.
Brain Food
Is taking a stance against generative AI good for business? The popular iPad design app Procreate was a hot topic on X yesterday. I posted a video “I hate generative AI,” said Google CEO James Kuda, vowing to never introduce generative AI features into his company’s products. The video, which has been viewed more than 8.5 million times, has clearly resonated with artists, especially those protesting against training AI models on copyrighted images. But it also raises questions about whether a stance against generative AI could be good for business in some cases. After all, Google is Pulled An Olympic advert in which an AI model wrote a young girl a fan letter to her favourite Olympian drew huge backlash online, and Apple also faced backlash earlier this year when it released an ad in which a creative tool was crushed by a giant hydraulic press and replaced with an iPad Pro.
