EGN NEWS DESK
With virtually half the world’s inhabitants going to the polls, 2024 was dubbed an excellent election 12 months, main many consultants to warn of a coming flood of political disinformation. After all, generative synthetic intelligence has made it potential for anybody, anyplace, to supply lifelike “deepfake” pictures and video. Never have anti-democratic unhealthy actors had such highly effective instruments for undermining free and honest elections.
Yet whereas AI-augmented disinformation has clearly proliferated on-line, it didn’t have a considerable destabilizing affect on democracy in 2024. The motive isn’t solely clear. Perhaps social media customers have turn out to be extra discerning, whereas fact-checkers and digital platforms have carried out a greater job of curbing the unfold of falsehoods — with Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter) being an apparent exception.
To make sure, within the U.S. presidential election, each side accused the opposite of making an attempt to suppress free speech and democracy. According to the main U.S. fact-checking web site Politifact, each campaigns issued deceptive or false statements, although the overwhelming majority got here from Donald Trump. Nonetheless, the worst predictions about AI disrupting the democratic course of weren’t borne out. More broadly, the outcomes of the 12 months’s elections all over the world had been a combined bag, however liberal and pluralist events and candidates usually exceeded expectations.
