Deepfake democracy: Behind the AI trickery shaping India’s 2024 election

Want an opponent to campaign for you? Confuse voters between a real and a fake video? As India prepares for the world’s largest elections, parties are turning to AI for novel – and dangerous – strategies.

New Delhi, India — As voters queued up early morning on November 30 last year to vote in legislative elections to choose the next government of the southern Indian state of Telangana, a seven-second clip started going viral on social media.

Posted on X by the Congress party, which is in opposition nationally, and was in the state at the time, it showed KT Rama Rao, a leader of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti that was ruling the state, calling on people to vote in favour of the Congress.

The Congress shared it widely on a range of WhatsApp groups “operated unofficially” by the party, according to a senior leader who requested anonymity. It eventually ended up on the official X account of the party, viewed more than 500,000 times.

It was fake.

“Of course, it was AI-generated though it looks completely real,” the Congress party leader told Al Jazeera. “But a normal voter would not be able to distinguish; voting had started [when the video was posted] and there was no time for [the opposition campaign] to control the damage.”

The astutely timed deepfake was a marker of the flood of AI-generated, or manipulated, media that marred a series of elections in India’s states in recent months, and that’s now threatening to fundamentally shape the country’s coming general elections.

Between March and May, India’s nearly one billion voters will pick their next national government in the world’s, and history’s, biggest elections. The threats posed by deceptive AI-generated media caught the world’s attention when faked sexually explicit