ELECTION SECURITYAI Disinformation: Lessons from the U.K. Election

By Sam Stockwell

The year of elections was also feared to be the year that deepfakes would be weaponized to manipulate election results or undermine trust in democracy.

The record-breaking 2024 figure of about 4 billion voters eligible to go to the polls across more than 60 countries coincided with the full-fledged arrival and widespread uptake of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (AI), which enables almost anyone to make fake images, videos and sound.

Have these fears been realized? Our center has analyzed the incidence of AI-generated disinformation around the UK election held on July 4 and found both reasons for some reassurance, but also grounds for concern over long-terms trends eroding democracy that these threats exacerbate.

In contrast to fears of a tsunami of AI fakes targeting political candidates, the UK saw only a handful of examples of such content going viral during the campaign period.

While there’s no evidence these examples swayed any large number of votes, we did see spikes in online harassment against the people targeted by the fakes. We also observed confusion among audiences over whether the content was authentic.

These early signals point to longer term trends that would damage the democratic system itself, such as online harassment creating a ‘chilling’ effect on the willingness of political candidates to participate in future elections, and an erosion of trust in the online information space as audiences become increasingly unsure about which content is AI-generated and therefore which sources can be trusted.

Similar findings on the impact of generative AI misuse in 18 other elections since January 2023 are reported in a recent CETaS briefing paper.

There has of course been a sensible case for heightened vigilance this year. From India to the UK, and from France to the US, the outcome of many of 2024’s elections have had, or will have, enormous geopolitical implications, thus giving malicious actors strong incentives to interfere.

The capability that generative AI gives users to create highly realistic content at scale using simple keyboard prompts has enhanced the disruptive powers of sophisticated state actors. But it has also dramatically lowered the barriers to access, such that even individual members of the public can pose risks to the integrity of democratic processes – including elections.