Tag Archives: deepfake

“The NRSC Is Using a Schumer Deepfake to Knock Democrats on Shutdown”

NOTUS / AP

The Senate Republican campaign arm put out an ad of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrating the ongoing government shutdown on Friday morning.

The clip, however, was a deepfake.

The video, published by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, features a grinning AI version of Schumer saying each day of the government shutdown “gets better for us.”

The quote is real — Schumer said it to Punchbowl last week. But the harshly lit video of Schumer in the Senate halls was generated using AI. The NRSC added a small watermark in the bottom right corner of the ad.

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“Overcoming Racial Harms to Democracy from Artificial Intelligence”

I posted this paper to SSRN, which will be published in the Iowa Law Review.  The abstract is below: 

While the United States is becoming more racially diverse, generative artificial intelligence and related technologies threaten to undermine truly representative democracy. Left unchecked, AI will exacerbate already substantial existing challenges, such as racial polarization, cultural anxiety, antidemocratic attitudes, racial vote dilution, and voter suppression. Synthetic video and audio (“deepfakes”) receive the bulk of popular attention—but are just the tip of the iceberg. Microtargeting of racially tailored disinformation, racial bias in automated election administration, discriminatory voting restrictions, racially targeted cyberattacks, and AI-powered surveillance that chills racial justice claims are just a few examples of how AI is threatening democracy. Unfortunately, existing laws—including the Voting Rights Act—are unlikely to address the challenges. These problems, however, are not insurmountable if policymakers, activists, and technology companies act now. This Article asserts that AI should be regulated to facilitate a racially inclusive democracy, proposes novel principles that provide a framework to regulate AI, and offers specific policy interventions to illustrate the implementation of the principles. Even though race is the most significant demographic factor that shapes voting patterns in the United States, this is the first article to comprehensively identify the racial harms to democracy posed by AI and offer a way forward.

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