An AI-generated image by in a new Republican National Committee ad shows likenesses of President Biden and Vice President Harris celebrating victory in the 2024 elections. Image: RNC video

AI Raises Red Flags with Anti-Biden Advertisement for 2024 Presidential Election

It didn’t take long for both American political parties to weaponize AI. Not just for storing data or running printing machines. Now AI has a new role and some think it’s over the top. And others believe it is outright dangerous to the continuity of our republic.

We found three stories this week from some of our favorite publishers that cover the latest shakeup in AI. From Mother Jones, Axios, and the Washington Post we see a lot of overlap concerning the attack by Republicans on Joe Biden’s announcement to run again for president. It was created entirely by AI through generating images and voiceover. And you can see several glitches in the video that are telltale signs it is an AI-produced political advertisement. Take a look below.

The motherjones.com article gives a second-by-second breakdown of mistakes in the video that you are perhaps missing. Some of the glitches are really just too odd to be real but they can be hard to catch. For instance in the photo below President Biden appears to be resting his arm and body weight on thin air, nowhere near the desk he is sitting at. Or allegedly sitting at. Take a look.

The washingtonpost.com points out the outright danger that the latest generative AI algorithms pose for most people. AI has gotten so good at text-to-image production that the deepfakes being produced are nearly impossible to spot.

Why It Matters 

Axios.com had a short and to-the-point piece about the Republican AI-generated swipe at Joe Biden by saying this:

AI-generated images are disrupting art, journalism, and now politics. The 2024 election is poised to be the first election with ads full of images generated by modern Artificial Intelligence software that are meant to look and feel real to voters.

AI language models and image generators have become increasingly accessible over the past year, resulting in a torrent of realistic-looking fake visuals accompanying major news events. Campaigns eager to stay on the cutting edge have been testing out the tools — dabbling with prompts for speeches in the style of certain politicians and enhancing fundraising pitches with AI-generated art.

An RNC spokesman did not respond to a question about which image generator was used to make the ad. But it was likely Midjourney, the platform recently used to generate make-believe scenes of former president Donald Trump being detained and Pope Francis wearing a fancy white puffy coat. The year-old company is run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers. Its CEO, David Holz, did not respond to a request for comment about the RNC ad.

And you can easily figure out the response from the other party.

The Democratic National Committee ridiculed the ad in a statement, saying the GOP “had to make up images because, quite simply, they can’t argue with President Biden’s results.”

Whether the productions are tacky or slick is really not the point of the three articles we will list below. It is a matter of being able to fool voters even more and divide them even more than they already are. Do we really need more of that?

Before this gets any further out of hand many people feel the U.S. Congress needs to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It is vital to return some balance and truth to what gets released to the voters.

read more at motherjones.com or at washingtonpost.com

still more at axios.com