Around the world, critical elections are taking place in 2024, and UVA Media Studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan is watching the way artificial intelligence is influencing the process both here in the U.S. and abroad.

“India and Pakistan having elections in the same year is pretty amazing,” Vaidhyanathan said on Charlottesville Right Now, noting that Israel’s elections also carry tremendous geopolitical gravity.

In Pakiston, Vaidhyanathan notes that previous Prime Minister Imran Khan was forced out of office, accused of corruption and then tried under suspicious circumstances. He is running for re-election from a prison cell, and AI has provided a powerful way for him to connect with supporters.

“What’s fascinating about that is he campaigned without ever campaigning,” Vaidhyanathan said. “He would write letters from prison to his lawyers. Then his lawyers would pass those letters on to his campaign staff, the party functionaries, and they would enter it into a voice generation program that… had been trained to mimic his voice.”

Vaidhyanathan said this use of AI was an effective tool.

“One, it gave people a sense that he wasn’t giving up even though he was in prison. And second, look, everybody knew it was artificial intelligence,” he said, “but it actually had an added advantage by making it clear that this had to be done by artificial intelligence.. [That] gave it more power as a political tool.”

Despite AI’s ubiquity and the frequent fears expressed around deep fakes fooling people into believing lies, Vaidhyanathan points out AI isn’t needed to create effective propaganda.
“We had a lot of propaganda in 1916. We had a lot of propaganda in 1940,” he said. “The notion that lies and myths and conspiracies require some sort of high-tech amplification is just not true.”

Vaidhyanathan believes a greater risk to democracy is not deep fakes or other propaganda. It’s that members of the general public have become so jaded that they no longer try to determine what’s true and what’s false.

“I just think everyday people right now think everything’s fake, right? I mean, what if we’re at that point where just nobody believes anything? I mean, that’s a terrifying situation. That’s, as [German historian and philosopher] Hannah Arendt warned us, the substrate, the base level of totalitarianism. Of lurching into fascism.”

Artificial intelligence, Vaidhyanathan says, “is the latest noisemaker in all of the noise that distracts us and dissuades us, and debilitates us from talking collectively about the serious issues that face us.”

Listen to the full interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan here.