Nov 30, 2023

CNN: Hany Farid Reflects on Biden Campaign’s New AI Taskforce

From CNN

First on CNN: Biden campaign prepares legal fight against election deepfakes

By Donie O’Sullivan and Brian Fung

President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign has assembled a special task force to ready its responses to misleading AI-generated images and videos, drafting court filings and preparing novel legal theories it could deploy to counter potential disinformation efforts that technology experts have warned could disrupt the vote.

The task force, which is composed of the campaign’s top lawyers and outside experts such as a former senior legal advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, is exploring what steps Biden could take if, for example, a fake video emerged of a state election official falsely claiming that polls are closed, or if an AI-generated image falsely portrayed Biden as urging non-citizens to cross the US border to cast ballots illegally...

Some of the campaign’s anti-disinformation efforts, including coordination with DNC officials, had been in place since the 2018 midterm elections. But the rapid surge in the availability of sophisticated AI tools in the past year makes AI a unique factor in the 2024 race, Hany Farid, a digital forensic expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN...

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Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

Last updated: December 4, 2023