Deepfake Politics How Ai Could Undermine The World S Largest

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 9:14 AM

deepfake politics how ai could undermine the world s largest

AI deepfakes are spreading faster than India’s election safeguards can keep up, and experts warn this may be the most vulnerable election cycle yet. Artificial intelligence has entered electoral politics at a speed that regulators simply did not anticipate. Over the past year, several high-profile incidents worldwide have shown how AI tools can manufacture persuasive political misinformation with almost no cost or effort. In early 2024, voters in the United States received a fake robocall mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice, an incident confirmed by the New Hampshire Attorney General and widely reported by The New York Times. Around the same time, Slovakia suffered a major disinformation surge when a deepfake audio clip circulated just before its elections, allegedly influencing voter sentiment; both Reuters and BBC News covered the fallout extensively. These events highlight a core problem: governments are still using analog-era safeguards against digital-era threats.

India faces a sharper version of this challenge simply because of its digital landscape and scale. With more than 820 million internet users and some of the world’s most active WhatsApp and Instagram populations, India provides fertile ground for rapid misinformation spread. The fact that political outreach in India heavily relies on short videos, forwards, and influencer-style messaging makes the environment even more vulnerable. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Artificial Intelligence, University of Toronto Professor, Artificial Intelligence & Mathematical Modeling Lab, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto Abbas Yazdinejad is a postdoctoral research fellow in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in the AIMML at the University of Toronto.

Jude Kong receives funding from NSERC, NFRF, IDRC, FCDO and SIDA. He is affiliated with Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Modelling Lab (AIMMLab), Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium (ACADIC), Global South Artificial Intelligence for Pandemic and Epidemic Preparedness and Response Network (AI4PEP), Canadian Black... University of Toronto provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA. Introducing Deepsight. Protect your business from deepfakes. Introducing Deepsight Protect your business from deepfakes

Deepfake technology is all fun and games until it falls into the hands of a bad actor. Thanks to the ongoing evolution of generative AI services, deepfakes are becoming more accessible and more sophisticated every day. As technology continues to evolve, it’s becoming harder and harder for human reviewers and professional fact-checkers to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. As a result, cases of deepfake cybercrime are becoming more common, with deepfake technology being exploited to improve the success rates of identity and financial fraud, spread misinformation, blackmail individuals or businesses, manipulate public... Over the past few years, the world has witnessed real-life cases of how the growing sophistication and accessibility of AI can erode trust in democratic processes, with deepfakes being used to influence public opinion... Voters leave after casting their ballot at a polling station in the final phase of voting in India's general election, in Kolkata on June 1, 2024.

Artificial intelligence tools were used to create memes and images about political rivals in India and elsewhere around the world. Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images hide caption In January, thousands of New Hampshire voters picked up their phones to hear what sounded like President Biden telling Democrats not to vote in the state's primary, just days away. "We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It's important you save your vote for the November election," the voice on the line said. But it wasn't Biden.

It was a deepfake created with artificial intelligence — and the manifestation of fears that 2024's global wave of elections would be manipulated with fake pictures, audio and video, due to rapid advances in... "The nightmare situation was the day before, the day of election, the day after election, some bombshell image, some bombshell video or audio would just set the world on fire," said Hany Farid, a... October 30, 2025 | andrealaws | Communication Studies, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Studies, Law, Media Studies, Political Science, Public Policy Earlier this year, X (formerly Twitter) filed a federal lawsuit against Minnesota challenging the state’s new law banning political deepfakes in the weeks leading up to elections. X argues the law violates the First Amendment and conflicts with federal protections for online platforms. The case is already being described as a pivotal test for whether voters will be shielded from the next wave of AI-driven deception or left defenseless against fabricated realities in one of the most...

The lawsuit arrives amid a broader storm. As of September 2025, more than two dozen states have introduced or passed laws to restrict or require disclosure of political deepfakes. The bans in Minnesota and Texas prohibit AI-generated political impersonations during sensitive pre-election periods. Others mandate disclaimers if candidates or campaigns use AI to produce content. But these laws face constitutional challenges at every turn, and it’s unclear whether they’ll survive judicial scrutiny. At the very same time, AI misinformation is exploding.

A new study found that the rate of false claims produced by popular chatbots nearly doubled in the past year, jumping from 18 percent to 35 percent of outputs. And AI-powered impersonation scams have surged by nearly 150 percent in 2025, according to cybersecurity experts, with fraudsters now able to clone a loved one’s voice, generate a fake video call, or create a... All of this points to a single reality: we are entering an era where truth is negotiable, facts are contested, and the line between reality and fiction is blurring in ways that threaten both... Which is why Professor Wes Henricksen’s new book, In Fraud We Trust, feels less like an academic treatise and more like a survival manual for democracy. Imagine this: It’s election night, 2025. You’re scrolling through your feed, and a video pops up of your least favorite politician—let’s say a fiery senator—casually admitting on camera to embezzling campaign funds while sipping a latte in a nondescript diner.

The lighting’s perfect, the voice matches down to the gravelly timbre, and the background chatter feels eerily authentic. You hit share, outraged, and by morning, it’s racked up millions of views. Hashtags explode. Polls shift. Careers crumble. Except… it never happened.

That “confession” was cooked up in a basement with nothing but a laptop, a few public speeches, and some open-source AI software. Welcome to the wild, woolly world of deepfakes—AI-generated forgeries so slick they’re rewriting the rules of truth itself. In politics and media, these digital doppelgängers aren’t just pranks; they’re weapons of mass distraction, eroding trust faster than a bad tweetstorm. But hey, at least they’re entertaining—until they’re not. Buckle up as we dive deep into how deepfakes are hijacking headlines, toppling democracies, and what we can do before the next viral video turns your reality into someone else’s fanfic. At its core, a deepfake is like a high-tech game of Mad Libs for your eyes and ears.

Powered by generative adversarial networks (GANs)—think two AI models duking it out, one creating fakes and the other sniffing them out—the tech has evolved from clunky 2017 Reddit experiments to Hollywood-level realism by 2025. Tools like Google’s Veo (launched with much fanfare mid-year) or open-source beasts like Stable Diffusion now let anyone with a decent GPU swap faces, clone voices, or even script entire scenes in minutes. No PhD required; just upload a target photo, feed it some audio clips, and boom—your uncle’s suddenly endorsing a crypto scam. The magic (or menace) lies in the data hunger. Deepfakes feast on vast troves of public footage: think C-SPAN clips for politicians or paparazzi reels for celebs. By 2025, with petabytes of scraped social media, these models achieve “character consistency”—meaning the fake you looks, moves, and emotes just like the real deal.

Want a deepfake of a world leader fumbling a speech? Easy. Add in diffusion models for buttery-smooth video, and it’s indistinguishable from a CNN exclusive. As one X user quipped in a viral thread, “Seeing isn’t believing anymore. Even the system itself can’t tell what’s real.” But here’s the fun (terrifying) kicker: accessibility.

Free apps like Reface or paid tiers on Midjourney churn out deepfakes faster than you can say “post-truth.” And with voice cloning? ElevenLabs can mimic anyone’s timbre from a 30-second sample. It’s democratized deception—anyone from a basement troll to a state-sponsored hacker can play God. The rise of deepfakes poses significant threats to elections, public figures, and the media. Recent Insikt Group research highlights 82 deepfakes targeting public figures in 38 countries between July 2023 and July 2024. Deepfakes aimed at financial gain, election manipulation, character assassination, and spreading non-consensual pornography are on the rise.

To counter these risks, organizations must act swiftly, increase awareness, and implement advanced AI detection tools. The proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes is reshaping the political and disinformation landscape. Between July 2023 and July 2024, deepfakes impersonating public figures surfaced in 38 countries, raising concerns about election interference, character defamation, and more. Here’s a detailed breakdown of these emerging threats and strategies to mitigate them. 82 deepfakes were identified in 38 countries, with 30 nations holding elections during the dataset timeframe or having elections planned for 2024. Political figures, heads of state, candidates, and journalists were targeted, amplifying the potential to disrupt democratic processes.

Scams (26.8%): Deepfakes are frequently used to promote financial scams, leveraging heightened attention during elections. Prominent figures like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President-Elect Claudia Sheinbaum were impersonated in fraudulent schemes. False Statements (25.6%): Deepfakes often fabricate public figures’ statements to mislead voters. For instance, fake audios emerged of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticizing his own party, and Taiwan’s Ko Wen-Je making false accusations. In recent years, artificial intelligence has made it possible to create convincingly realistic fake videos of public figures. These AI-generated fake political videos – often called deepfakes – can depict politicians and leaders saying or doing things that never actually happened.

What began as a fringe internet novelty has rapidly evolved into a serious global concern for democracies, journalists, and policymakers. Deepfakes leverage powerful generative AI algorithms to produce fabricated video and audio that can be difficult for viewers to distinguish from real footage. As this technology becomes more accessible, incidents of fake political videos have surged worldwide, raising alarms about their potential to spread misinformation, disrupt elections, and erode public trust in media. This comprehensive overview explores what deepfake political videos are and how they are made, surveys notable incidents and trends across different regions, examines the risks they pose to democratic societies, reviews the current state... By understanding the scope and scale of the problem – from a fake “Zelenskyy” urging Ukrainians to surrender to AI-generated “news anchors” spreading propaganda – we can better prepare to confront the growing threat... To grasp the issue, one must first understand what deepfakes are and how they work.

Deepfake is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”, referring to synthetic media created using AI algorithms. In essence, deepfakes use advanced machine-learning models – often generative adversarial networks (GANs) or similar techniques – to manipulate or fabricate video and audio content. By training on many images or recordings of a target person, a deepfake model can generate a highly realistic video in which that person’s face and voice are superimposed onto an actor’s performance, making... In the context of politics, AI-generated fake political videos typically involve a public figure (such as a head of state, candidate, or government official) depicted in a fabricated scenario. For example, an AI might produce a video of a president announcing a fake policy, or a candidate uttering inflammatory remarks – all without that person’s involvement. These videos can be very realistic: modern deepfakes capture subtle facial expressions, sync mouth movements to speech, and mimic vocal tone with alarming accuracy.

Deepfake Politics How Ai Could Undermine The World S Largest

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