AI meme wars hit India election, test social platforms
Indian political parties BJP and Congress have created and shared AI-crafted political content on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, without explicit disclosures, our investigation found.
My review and subsequent forensic testing found at least three instances of AI-created or altered content published on the official Instagram handles of both the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since February 20. Political parties are pushing the limits of AI’s use to both ridicule opponents and boost their own popularity on official pages, and in doing so, testing the boundaries of platform policies on labelling deceptive political content.
The University at Buffalo Media Forensic Lab, and Indian firm Dubverse.ai helped conducted forensic test to identify if the content was AI manipulated or not. The tests also revealed limitation in current AI testing software were good at identifying AI speech, they failed to detect AI songs — which is an emerging vector of misinformation.
This story on AI-enhanced propaganda content used by official party handles led to follow ups by national dailies, and was cited in the 2024 AI election tracker by Rest of World.