To Safeguard Democracy, Political Ads Should Disclose Use Of AI

U.S. Representative Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) recently proposed a bill that would require disclosure of use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creation of political advertisements. This is a timely bill that should garner bipartisan support and help safeguard our democracy. Recent advancements in language modeling, exemplified by the popularity of ChatGPT, and image generation, exemplified by Dall-E 2 and Midjourney, make it much easier to create texts or images that are intentionally misleading or false. Indeed, there are examples of people already using these technologies to spread fake political news in the U.S. and abroad. In early April a number of fake AI generated images of President Trump mug shots circulated online, and later that month the Republican National Committee (RNC) responded to President Biden’s re-election campaign with an AI-generated ad. In May there were accusations of AI being used in deceptive political ads in the lead up to Turkey’s elections.

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