Just days out from the election, candidates are making their final pitches to the American public. But in the age of AI fakery, how can voters be sure it is indeed a real politician speaking in that robocall or video ad?
Audio deepfake detection service Pindrop has rounded up some of the most common expected scams for which to be on guard—as well as resources and tips to avoid them—as Election Day looms. Those include fake voter registration links and polling locations, as well as various deepfakes and voice clones.
While political AI-generated imagery, video, and audio has certainly spread online as generative tools have become more freely available, there isn’t much evidence yet that deepfake campaigns have managed to sway voters in any great numbers. But Pindrop CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan said the amount of synthetic media is only growing as November approaches, and bad actors have honed techniques to make it seem more convincingly real.
Undue urgency: Any robocalls or other communication calling on you to take action with an abnormal sense of urgency should be seen as a red flag, Balasubramaniyan said, though it may be hard to tell as campaigns have often turned to attention-grabbing desperation in texts and emails.
“Beware of urgency,” Balasubramaniyan said. “The deepfakes that we see—they’re always saying the first 10 people to do this or the first 1,000 people to do this…We’re seeing things like, ‘This is a candidate. He’s offering a limited-offer thing for a particular piece of memorabilia.’ It may not be election misinformation, but it could be just plain scams.”
Another easy giveaway is when a call is offering money to vote or any other exchange of payment, he said.
Verify veracity: Balasubramaniyan said a tool from the nonprofit True Media can help determine whether a piece of media or social post is real or fake. All one has to do is input a URL. Call-protection apps like Truecaller and YouMail can also help to weed out deepfake robocalls.
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Any information about voter registration or polling location should also be double-checked with a trusted official source.
Think local: Pindrop made headlines earlier this year when it helped identify the voice-cloning service behind a fake robocall purporting to be the voice of President Biden and aimed at New Hampshire voters. But Balasubramaniyan said similar scams involving local officials may be flying under the radar.
“Robocalling plus LLMs combined with text-to-speech gives you an amazing ability to not just scale but hyper-localize, which is, I can go to one county which has a particular area code and bombard them with a message that is generated by one of these AI applications. But it only matters to that county because of…what issues are important to them,” he said. “That combination of scale and hyper-localization is insane.”
Splice job: Just because one part of a video or audio clip is clearly authentic, that doesn’t mean other parts haven’t been tampered with.
“What we’re seeing now more…is partial deepfakes, so anywhere between 20% to 80% of the content is real,” Balasubramaniyan said. “And then there are these occasional, intermittent portions that are deepfake, and that makes them even more nefarious.”
Despite the flood of fakery, Balasubramaniyan is confident that detectors will win out because deepfake creators have to get every detail right, while detectors only need to find one mistake.
“The fact is that that asymmetry of detection being so much cheaper than generation is what’s going to help us continue to stay ahead.”