Bill Gates: AI Can ‘Undermine Elections’ and ‘Tip The Scale’ in Close Races

Microsoft founder, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, takes part in a conference call in Lyon, France, on Oct. 9, 2019. Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that artificial intelligence technologies could aid in manipulating elections and “tip” results in close races.

“Deepfakes and misinformation generated by AI could undermine elections and democracy … AI-generated deepfakes could be used to try to tilt an election,” Mr. Gates said in a July 11 blog post. “There are already phony videos that feature fabricated footage of well-known politicians. Imagine that on the morning of a major election, a video showing one of the candidates robbing a bank goes viral. It’s fake, but it takes news outlets and the campaign several hours to prove it.”

“How many people will see it and change their votes at the last minute? It could tip the scales, especially in a close election.”

The ability of AIs to generate realistic imagery is what makes it a perfect tool to spread misinformation online and sway public opinions. As AI lowers the difficulty of creating high-quality content, it could open up the pathway for large-scale microtargeting of specific populations to influence them in favor of a party or candidate.

In the 2024 presidential race, the use of fake AI imagery has already caused worries. Last month, a Twitter account called DeSantis War Room shared a video showing several images of Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, three of which depicted Trump hugging and kissing Fauci on the face with the caption “REAL LIFE TRUMP,” suggesting a close relationship.

However, it later came to light that the images were fake and generated via AI. “Smearing Donald Trump with fake AI images is completely unacceptable. I’m not sharing them, but we’re in a new era. Be even more skeptical of what you see on the internet,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said in a June 8 tweet.

In April, a video of Hillary Clinton seemingly endorsing DeSantis for presidency spread online. The video was a deep fake.

Despite Mr. Gates’s concerns, his company Microsoft is a major player in the AI field. The firm has reportedly invested $13 billion into OpenAI, the company which developed the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Microsoft has also integrated OpenAIs artificial intelligence processing code into its Bing search engine and other services.

Though Mr. Gates admits that the problem of deepfakes has not been resolved, he is “guardedly optimistic” about countering the issue due to the fact that people “are capable of learning not to take everything at face value.”

The billionaire also pointed out that AI can not only be used to create deepfakes but also aid in identifying them. “Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated.”

Besides that, Mr. Gates said people will learn “to look twice” and not be duped as time passes, similar to the “Nigerian prince” emails. “We’ll need to build the same muscle for deepfakes.”

Manipulating Elections

In a Jan. 4 commentary for The Epoch Times, Anders Corr, a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., explained how AI threatens a democratic system.

“AI will be able to find minimum winning coalitions in n-dimensional political space to determine short- and medium-term political goals, for example, and then influence those populations through AI content production,” he wrote.

“Through micro-targeting, micro-production, and micro-delivery of subtle propaganda, AI could determine democratic decision-making outcomes like at no other time in history, thereby making those formerly democratic processes undemocratic.”

Ai-DA, the world's first robot artist, paints portraits of the headline acts in the Ai-DA Robot Booth in the Shangri La Field, during day two of Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton in Glastonbury, England, on June 23, 2022. Leon Neal/Getty Images

OpenAI has already disallowed the use of its artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for “political campaigning or lobbying.”

This includes restrictions on “generating high volumes of campaign materials” and a ban on “campaign materials personalized to or targeted at specific demographics.”

Calls for legal restrictions on the use of AI for political purposes are strengthening. Nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen has urged the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) to create a rule banning the use of political deepfakes. It also called on major political parties and their candidates to pledge not to use these tools to mislead the electorate.

“Generative A.I. now poses a significant threat to truth and democracy as we know it,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, according to a June 20 press release.

“The technology threatens election-altering hoaxes, on the one hand, and a destruction of voters’ ability to believe even truthful images and information, on the other.”

An Ipsos poll conducted in April found that 76 percent of respondents were worried about AI-generated deepfakes driving misinformation.

Countering Drawbacks

In his blog post, Mr. Gates noted that hackers will now use the technical prowess of AI to “write more effective code. They’ll also be able to use public information about individuals, like where they work and who their friends are, to develop phishing attacks that are more advanced than the ones we see today.”

But in this instance as well, Mr. Gates pointed to using AI to counter such attacks. He added that for this reason, “we should not try to temporarily keep people from implementing new developments in AI, as some have proposed.”

For all drawbacks, Mr. Gates had a positive counter-take regarding AI, which is not surprising as his companies are invested in the technology.

However, other experts in the field do not share the same optimism.

Unlike what the tech companies perceived as an easy win, AI adoption has met stiff resistance in many industries and sectors.

In a speech at the Collision tech conference in Toronto on June 28, Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto who is also known as one of the “godfathers of AI,” warned that artificial intelligence may develop a desire to seize control from human beings in a bid to accomplish its programmed goals.

“At a very general level, if you’ve got something that’s a lot smarter than you, that’s very good at manipulating people, at a very general level, are you confident that people stay in charge? I think they’ll derive [the motive to seize control] as a way of achieving other goals,” he said.