Big Tech tells politicians: We’ll control the deepfakes

“This is a pivotal year for the future of democracy. With more than 4 billion people heading to the polls around the world, security and trust are going to be essential to the success of these campaigns and these elections,” Max Peterson, vice president at Amazon Web Services, said at the launch.

POLITICO first reported on the plans on Tuesday.

Political deepfakes have already popped up in the U.S., Poland and the U.K., among many other countries. Most recently, the U.S. was rocked by a robocall impersonating President Joe Biden, raising fears over the tech’s influence on the country’s politics.

Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, said deepfakes were fundamentally creating a “paranoid citizen” who cannot trust with their own eyes.

“You are not ready to trust anything,” Krastev said. “Before you’d say ‘I want to see it,’ now seeing it means nothing.”

The cybersecurity sector also warned that cybercriminals and hacking groups were picking up on AI. Microsoft last week said it had seen hackers linked to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran using AI to improve their cyberattacks, including using generated media to better trick targets and speed up attacks.