Fears UK not ready for deepfake general election

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already been used to disrupt elections around the world - and there are fears among senior politicians and the security services that the UK will be next.

Former Justice Secretary Sir Robert Buckland is urging the government to do more to tackle what he sees as a "clear and present danger" to UK democracy.

The Conservative MP, who now chairs the Northern Ireland select committee, is particularly concerned about the rise of deepfakes - realistic audio and video clips of politicians appearing to say things they did not say.

The threat posed to democracy by AI-generated misinformation does not belong to some dystopian vision of the future, he argues.

"The future is here. It's happening.

"Unless the policymakers [in the UK] are showing some leadership on the need for a strong and effective domestic set of guardrails - plus international work - then we are going to be behind the curve."

He fears the next general election, which must take place by January 2025, could face the kind of disruption seen in 2017, when campaigning was suspended less than a week before polling day after the Manchester Arena bombing.

The UK government says it is taking steps to protect elections from foreign interference, through a Defending Democracy Taskforce launched last year and chaired by Home Office Security Minister Tom Tugendhat.

Many of the threats it is targeting are not new. Misinformation and dirty tricks have long been a feature of election campaigns around the world. Photoshopped images and memes - and even doctored audio of politicians - have been around for decades.

What is new, as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) - an arm of GCHQ - pointed out in its annual report, is the easy availability of powerful, generative AI tools, which can be used to create convincing fakes.

The boom in large language models, such as ChatGPT, and text-to-speech, or text-to-video, software, is seen by some as a gift to those bent on disrupting elections, from bedroom-based mischief makers to malicious state actors.

"Large language models will almost certainly be used to generate fabricated content, AI-created hyper-realistic bots will make the spread of disinformation easier and the manipulation of media for use in deepfake campaigns will likely become more advanced," warns the NCSC in its report.

The Labour Party got a taste of what might be to come during its party conference in September, when an audio clip popped up on social media of leader Sir Keir Starmer apparently verbally abusing aides. The clip was quickly denounced as a fake, but was viewed 1.5 million times.

In November, a fake audio clip of London Mayor Sadiq Khan calling for Armistice Day to be re-scheduled due to a pro-Palestinian march circulated widely on social media.

Mr Khan warned that deepfakes were a "slippery slope" for democracy if not properly regulated after the Met Police decided no offence had been committed.

The nightmare scenario, for Sir Robert Buckland and others worried about this issue, is a deepfake clip of a party leader emerging just before polling day in a closely-fought election.

This is exactly what happened in Slovakia's general election in September, when a fake audio clip emerged of Michal Šimečka, the leader of the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, apparently discussing how to rig the election.

Mr Šimečka went on to lose the election to the populist pro-Moscow Smer-SSD party.

"Who knows how many votes it changed - or how many were convinced not to vote at all":[]}