Experts war-gamed what might happen if deepfakes disrupt the 2024 election. Things went sideways fast.
It’s Election Day in Arizona and elderly voters in Maricopa County are told by phone that local polling places are closed due to threats frommilitia groups.
Meanwhile, in Miami, a flurry of photos and videos on social media showpoll workers dumping ballots.
The phone calls in Arizona and the videos in Florida turn out to be “deepfakes” created with artificial intelligence tools. But by the time local and federal authorities figure out what they are dealing with, the false information has gone viral across the country.
This simulated scenario was part of a recent exercise in New York that gathered dozens of former senior U.S. and state officials, civil society leaders and executives from technology companies to rehearse for the 2024 election.
The results were sobering.
“It was jarring for folks in the room to see how quickly just a handful of these types of threats could spiral out of control and really dominate the election cycle,” said Miles Taylor, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who helped organize the exercise for the Washington-based nonprofit The Future US.
Dubbed “The Deepfake Dilemma,” the exercise illustrated how AI-enabled tools threaten to turbocharge the spread of false information in an already polarized society and could sow chaos in the 2024 election, multiple participants told NBC News. Rather than examining a singular attack by a group or hostile regime, the exercise explored a scenario with an array of both domestic and foreign actors launching disinformation, exploiting rumors and seizing on political divisions.
The organizers and participants in the war game spoke exclusively to NBC News about how it played out.
They said it raised worrisome questions about whether federal and local officials — and the tech industry — are prepared to counter both foreign and domestic disinformation designed to undermine public confidence in the election results.
“Now, in the last few years, we in America are having to defend assaults on our elections from both domestic and foreign forces.We just don’t have the infrastructure or the history to do it at scale because we’ve never had to face threats this severe in the past,” said Penniman, who took part in the exercise.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/war-game-deepfakes-disrupt-2024-election-rcna143038
the absurdity of this article keeps on going, but you get the idea of it.
This is a full blown PANIC!!!
This is NBCNews