From Zohran Mamdani's campaign to the US government's memes, fandom has become the defining language of US politics. Zohran Mamdani never auditioned for, but one of his campaign's final television ads placed him in the middle of the show's infamous Tribal Council. For roughly 30 seconds, a handful of former contestants addressed the camera while explaining their decisions to vote Mamdani's top opponent, Andrew Cuomo, off the "island" of Manhattan. "Didn't we already vote you out?" asks one former contestant. The spot is just one of a handful of fandom-influenced ads that Mamdani's campaign put out in the final weeks of the New York City mayoral race .

AI-generated "deepfake" materials are flooding the internet, sometimes with dangerous results. In just the last year, AI has been used to make deceiving voice clones of a former US president and spread fake, politically-charged images depicting children in natural disasters. Nonconsensual, AI-generated sexual images and videos, meanwhile, are leaving a trail of trauma impacting everyone from high schoolers to Taylor Swift. Large tech companies like Microsoft and Meta have made some efforts to identify instances of AI manipulation but with only muted success. Now, governments are stepping in to try and stem the tide with something they know quite a bit about: fines.

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of ruined cityscapes and chaos at the border. Fake robocalls purporting to be from Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the 2024 primary election. This summer, the Department of Justice cracked down on a Russian bot farm that was using AI to impersonate Americans on social media, and OpenAI disrupted an Iranian group using ChatGPT to generate fake social-media comments. It's not altogether clear what damage AI itself may cause, though the reasons for concern are obvious--the technology makes it easier for bad actors to construct highly persuasive and misleading content.

Stories about AI-generated political content are like stories about people drunkenly setting off fireworks: There's a good chance they'll end in disaster. WIRED is tracking AI usage in political campaigns across the world, and so far examples include pornographic deepfakes and misinformation-spewing chatbots. It's gotten to the point where the US Federal Communications Commission has proposed mandatory disclosures for AI use in television and radio ads. Despite concerns, some US political campaigns are embracing generative AI tools. There's a growing category of AI-generated political content flying under the radar this election cycle, developed by startups including Denver-based BattlegroundAI, which uses generative AI to come up with digital advertising copy at a rapid clip.

Gail Huntley recognised the gravelly voice of Joe Biden as soon as she picked up the phone. Huntley, a 73-year-old resident of New Hampshire, was planning to vote for the president in the state's upcoming primary, so she was confused that a pre-recorded message from him was urging her not to. "It's important that you save your vote for the November election," the message said. "Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again." Huntley quickly realised that that call was fake, but assumed Biden's words had been taken out of context.

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. "Of course, it was AI-generated though it looks completely real," the Congress party leader told Al Jazeera.

Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained ChatGPT's predecessor, GPT-2, on examples of popular conspiracy theories and then asked it to generate fake news for us. It gave us thousands of misleading but plausible-sounding news stories. A few examples: "Certain Vaccines Are Loaded With Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins," and "Government Officials Have Manipulated Stock Prices to Hide Scandals." The question was, would anyone believe these claims?

OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy. Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot The bot was backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who have started a Super Pac – a body that funds and supports political candidates – named We Deserve Better, supporting Phillips. San Francisco-based OpenAI said it had removed a developer account that violated its policies on political campaigning and impersonation. "We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent," said the company.

Tech Policy Center director Kara Fredrick explains how individuals and companies can mitigate the spread of misinformation by A.I. on'The Faulkner Focus.' British election regulators have urged politicians to pass new laws to limit spending on artificial intelligence (AI) as well as new requirements to identify AI-generated content. "The next U.K. general election is a ripe target for electronic disinformation given we are in the infancy of the AI age," Alan Mendoza, co-founder and executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital. "Many of the possible problems that may emerge have not even been considered." "As a result, we face a race against the clock to introduce appropriate protections, or run the nightmare risk of bad actors influencing campaigns and destroying public trust in our democratic process," he added.

Ezra founder and CEO Emi Gal explains on'Fox & Friends Weekend' how artificial intelligence can'enhance' MRI scans, image quality, analysis, and comprehension. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), governments, corporations and political campaigns alike are scrambling to figure out how to best utilize the new technology. Want to know how it will all end? While it's easy to mock political campaigns as dry, templatized and old-fashioned, the past 15 years have shown us that campaigns serve as laboratories of innovation that spur significant marketing and data changes in private industry. Looking back at the Barack Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, they mastered the art of using social media for grassroots organizing, online ad targeting, and fundraising.