Concern rises for 'deepfakes' during general election campaign

Experts have warned voters to be wary of the potential use of deepfakes to spread misinformation during the general election campaign.

As the election period continues to heat up with political parties making election promises to win supporters over, the potential for misinformation continues to rise in an attempt to sway voters.

Now, the public is being asked to keep an eye out for potential deepfakes that could cause fake news about the election to spread on social media.

Deepfaking is the process of super-imposing a person's face onto that someone else, through the use of graphics and artificial intelligence.

Other elements on deepfaking include the distortion and cloning of voices to make it sound as if a person is saying something that they have in fact not.

Ciaran Martin, former leader of the National Cyber Security Centre, said that audio is one area that he is particularly worried about in the rise of deepfakes.

"I'm particularly worried right now about audio, because audio deepfakes are spectacularly easy to make, disturbingly easy," he explained.

"So, I don't think there is a blanket solution here. There's no button you can press to make this go away."

Many cybersecurity experts have expressed their concern over the potential for foreign powers to hijack the election and push their own narratives.

This ideal has struck Polly Curtis, chief executive of thinktank Demos, particularly hard, as it reduces the strength of what is deemed to be legitimate.

"The risk is that you'll have foreign actors, you'll have political parties, you'll have activists, you'll have ordinary people on the street creating content and just stirring the pot of what's true and what's not true," she explained.

The influence of deepfakes has already been felt in previous instances, including in India and the United States, where Joe Biden's voice was cloned to speak against his government's policies.

Imran Ahmed, from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said that politicians need to be strategising on how deal with the technology.

"We need people to feel that they're able to make an empowered decision, based on what they can see and hear, and what they know to be true," he said.

"And that way, you can have an election that passes by where people feel like their vote has mattered."

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• general election