
As the world went to the polls during 2024, we saw generative AI deployed in an attempt to sow confusion and disrupt democratic processes. In the US, deepfake audio of President Biden was deployed to spread confusion about the presidential primaries. In India and South Africa, AI-generated election endorsements mimicked the identities of politicians, both living and dead.
The AI incidents observed during the 2024 elections may be harbingers of what’s to come with increasingly capable and accessible AI systems, and they shined a light on the importance of building democratic resilience to disinformation more generally. At Demos, we have outlined practical steps policy makers and tech companies could take to mitigate these harms from fake and misleading content, in our recent report Generative AI and Democracy: Impacts and Interventions.
This briefing paper is the culmination of a collaboration between Demos Digital – Demos’s Digital policy research team – and the Hogan Lovells Public Law & Policy and Pro Bono teams. Drawing on Hogan Lovells’ recent paper, together we investigated implications of AI-enabled disinformation and fake content for impacting democratic processes, and the potential obligations of states to uphold human rights to free and fair elections and freedom of expression as articulated by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in response to these threats.