AI and the 2024 Election: How to Protect Yourself

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Speaker 1: This is Barron's Live. Each weekday, we bring you live conversations from our newsrooms about what's moving the market right now. On this podcast, we take you inside those conversations, the stories, the ideas, and the stocks to watch so you can invest smarter. Now, let's dial in.

Jeremy Owens: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Barron's Live MarketWatch edition. I'm Jeremy Owens, tech editor in San Francisco, bureau chief for MarketWatch. Joining me today is Susan Gonzalez, founder and CEO of AIandYou, a nonprofit attempting to help people understand and combat the influences of artificial intelligence. Welcome, Susan. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Susan Gonzales: Thanks for having me.

Jeremy Owens: Now, Susan's here to discuss how AI is going to be used in the 2024 election, which we're now less than a year away from. We are in the 2024 election cycle as of last week or so, and we expect AI to be used to misinform and disinform voters. It's undoubtedly going to happen, and that fact appears to be pretty well known. A recent poll from the Associated Press and their partners showed that 58% of US adults believe AI will increase the spread of false and misleading information during the current election cycle. And yeah, I've got to tell you, one of those people was sitting right here in this chair talking to you right now, and I would imagine, Susan, that you sit in that camp as well, right?

Susan Gonzales: Absolutely.

Jeremy Owens: So let's talk about specifically how this is going to happen. Now, we've been through the 2016 and 2020 election cycle so far and seen a lot of fake news, fake events even, spread on social media, and we're going to, I think, see what the poll is saying, what I believe is that those same type of things will just spread more easily and be more confusing. Obviously, we're also going to see some deepfake videos and audios. We've already seen a Ron DeSantis ad using faked audio from Donald Trump. Kind of talk us through that and what else we might see along with chatbots and other things in this election. We might've lost Susan, it appears we did lose-

Susan Gonzales: I think it's helpful to, can you hear me?

Jeremy Owens: Yeah, you're just breaking up a little bit there.

Susan Gonzales: Oh, sorry. I was going to say, okay, how's it working out?

Jeremy Owens: I hear you.

Susan Gonzales: Okay, got it. Okay. So what I was saying is I think it's helpful to take a step back when we're looking at this election because I'm often asked, "Well, why is it so different this time? Why are these deepfakes happening? So think about it, four years ago during the last election, we weren't able to grocery shop online. We weren't able to easily watch our next favorite streaming movie because it's recommending what we like. There are so many things that we can do today because of advanced technologies that we couldn't do four years ago. It's those technologies that are allowing all of these things to happen this time. So four years ago, a deepfake, which by the way is a fake and (inaudible) video. It doesn't even have to be (inaudible).

Jeremy Owens: And even in 2016, we saw a fake Hillary Clinton video that was so obviously fake. And social media rushed to take it down, ban it from the platform, but anybody who watched it with a sense of knowledge would know that that was fake. Now, these videos and audio have become so much better at the rapid pace of technological advance.

Susan Gonzales: Yeah, it's not only that, it's that four years ago it might have required somebody who, let's say, was in the tech industry to create that Hillary deepfake, but today you and I could do it in our living room. I hired a 17-year-old family member a few months ago to create a deepfake so I can understand it more. And within eight hours, he hadn't even considered, he didn't even really know what his deepfake was. Within eight hours, he was able to create a rough one with both candidates or two candidates. So that was just reflective of how easy it is for people to make these things that might look real, that might look like an official advertisement that we're used to in past elections. So the onus, unfortunately, is on voters. We need to take the action to protect our vote.

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