There’s also been an explosion of political deepfakes. The Trump administration, for example, has regularly produced and shared AI-generated images and videos. Not all of them are even meant to look real, but others appear to be designed to sway public opinion and even humiliate the person depicted.
In January, meanwhile, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton shared a video appearing to show his opponent in the Republican primary for a US Senate seat, Senator John Cornyn, dancing with Representative Jasmine Crockett, a contender for the Democratic nomination. But this never happened—a fact the ad did not disclose clearly.
Suggested solutions include instituting new technical safeguards and detection methods at the big AI firms, encouraging users to take more protective actions, and crafting new legislation or applying existing regulatory frameworks, like copyright law, to the issue.
But these all have limits. Technical solutions can be bypassed; for instance, bad actors can simply switch to open-source models built without safeguards. Getting people to change how they behave, such as by watermarking photos or posting less personal information online, is simply unrealistic. Stronger regulations require enforcement—and while President Trump has signed legislation that criminalizes deepfake porn, his administration continues to post other types of harmful deepfakes. In late January, for instance, the White House shared an altered image of a Minneapolis civil rights lawyer, darkening her skin and changing her facial expression from one of calm to exaggerated crying.
The problem could get much worse—and soon. There are high-stakes midterm elections in the United States later this year, and the federal agencies that traditionally addressed elections-related information integrity have been weakened. So have many outside research groups dedicated to fact-checking and fighting election-related disinformation.