Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve
India’s elections are a glimpse of the AI-driven future of democracy. Politicians are using audio and video deepfakes of themselves to reach voters—who may have no idea they’ve been talking to a clone.
While the global discourse on deepfakes focused on misinformation and other societal harms, many Indian politicians used the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach. Our months long investigation uncovered that more than 50 million AI-generated voice clone calls were made in the two months leading up to the start of the elections in April—and millions more were made in May. We spoke to half a dozen companies across India working on millions of dollars’ worth of deepfake campaigns. One of them conducted 25 million personalized AI calls during the two weeks leading up to the general election in the southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh alone. In another state, hundreds of thousands calls were made in the voice of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cloned from speeches available online, endorsing a local candidate.
Al Jazeera’s news podcast The Take, along with global technology podcasts WIRED Politics and Somewhere on Earth, each featured a segment on the investigation in which I appeared to discuss my findings and elaborated on the worries of AI-mediated democracy. Journalist Mike Masnik discussed the feature on his podcast Ctrl-Alt-Speech. Indian online webiste The Print aggregated the story, and was cited in Platformer, Politico, Moneycontrol, NiemanLab, and Economic Times. Technology policy publication Medianama cited the piece in their Guide on Deepfake and Elections.