Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. "Free speech" was the battering ram that Elon Musk used to justify his pursuit of Twitter in 2022. He talked about the platform as the new digital town square. He said social media companies' moderation policies should be no more restrictive than national laws. "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means," he wrote after agreeing to a 44 billion takeover. In the three years since making the deal, Musk has continued to cloak himself in the armor of a free speech warrior, out there fighting for the rest of us.

This election cycle will be the first exposed to generative artificial intelligence--the technology behind popular apps like ChatGPT that enables even non-experts to create fake, but realistic-looking text, video, and audio perfectly suited for political manipulation. At the same time, a number of the major social-media companies have retreated from some of their prior commitments to promote "election integrity." The November election is also the first that will register the impact of the enormous popularity of TikTok, which uses a recommendation algorithm that some experts believe is particularly suited to spreading misinformation. Let's start with the rise of generative AI, which allows virtually anyone to produce persuasive text, imagery, or sound based on relatively simple natural-language prompts. In January, Facebook circulated a fake AI-generated image of Donald Trump sitting next to Jeffrey Epstein on the disgraced financier and sex offender's private jet.

With the rise of AI tools that can quickly create modified images and videos, making fake images to spread political misinformation leading to the upcoming US presidential election has become easier than ever. Midjourney's solution to that might be to ban political images altogether, according to Bloomberg. David Holz, Midjourney's CEO, reportedly told users during a chat session on Discord that the company is close to banning images such as those of Biden and Trump over the next 12 months. "I know it's fun to make Trump pictures -- I make Trump pictures," he told users who attended the session. "Trump is aesthetically really interesting.

Disinformation is when someone knows the truth but wants us to believe otherwise. Better known as "lying," disinformation is rife in election campaigns. However, under the guise of "fake news," it's rarely been as pervasive and toxic as it's become in this year's US presidential campaign. Sadly, artificial intelligence has been accelerating the spread of deception to a shocking degree in our political culture. AI-generated deepfake media are the least of it.

Zoltan Istvan is many things: a journalist, a futurist and entrepreneur. Mostly, though, he's been a cheerleader for the transhumanist movement, a philosophy focused on merging humans together with technology. To live forever as a new post-human species. Istvan kicked off a presidential campaign as head of the Transhumanist Party in 2014, mostly to spread the word about the movement. We sat down to talk with him about his experience running for president, and why voters should care about the transhumanist movement. Was the process of running this campaign what you expected? My campaign has been pretty much to always spread the message around transhumanism. It was never to win, and I said that from the very beginning. What I didn't expect is that I would very quickly enter into the top 10 candidates for almost the entire two years. Just three years ago, I signed with one of the major websites that puts you together with candidates.