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.

A few months ago, everyone was worried about how AI would impact the 2024 election. It seems like some of the angst has dissipated, but political deepfakes--including pornographic images and video--are still everywhere. Today on the show, WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Will Knight talk about what has changed with AI and what we should worry about. Or you can write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

No political deepfake has alarmed the world's disinformation experts more than the doctored audio message of U.S. President Joe Biden that began circulating over the weekend. In the phone message, a voice edited to sound like Biden urged voters in New Hampshire not to cast their ballots in Tuesday's Democratic primary. "Save your vote for the November election," the phone message went. It even made use of one of Biden's signature phrases: "What a bunch of malarkey." In reality, the president isn't on the ballot in the New Hampshire race -- and voting in the primary doesn't preclude people from participating in November's election.

No political deepfake has alarmed the world's disinformation experts more than the doctored audio message of U.S. President Joe Biden that began circulating over the weekend. In the phone message, a voice edited to sound like Biden urged voters in New Hampshire not to cast their ballots in Tuesday's Democratic primary. "Save your vote for the November election," the phone message went. It even made use of one of Biden's signature phrases: "What a bunch of malarkey." In reality, the president isn't on the ballot in the New Hampshire race -- and voting in the primary doesn't preclude people from participating in November's election.

The row over a manipulated photo of Rishi Sunak pulling an imperfect pint is the latest example of doctored or deepfake images attempting to disrupt politics. Using false information or imagery to alter public opinion is not new but breakthroughs in artificial intelligence threaten to take deception to a new level. Here are some recent examples of image-based disinformation. Last year a video appeared of the Ukrainian president calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. It was an amateurish example of a deepfake, the term for a hoax that uses AI to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people.

Analysis For campaigners hoping that 2022 could be the year that deepfaked imagery falls within a stricter legal purview, the early indicators are unpromising. Last Thursday the European Parliament ratified amendments to the Digital Services Act (DSA, due to take effect in 2023), in regards to the dissemination of deepfakes. The modifications address deepfakes across two sections, each directly related to online advertising: amendment 1709 pertaining to Article 30, and a related amendment to article 63. 'Where a very large online platform becomes aware that a piece of content is a generated or manipulated image, audio or video content that appreciably resembles existing persons, objects, places or other entities or events and falsely appears to a person to be authentic or truthful (deep fakes), the provider shall label the content in a way that informs that the content is inauthentic and that is clearly visible for the recipient of the services.' The second adds text to the existing article 63, which is itself mainly concerned with increasing the transparency of large advertising platforms. 'In addition, very large online platforms should label any known deep fake videos, audio or other files.'

Media manipulation through images and videos has been around for decades. For example, in WWII Mousollini released a propaganda image of himself on a horse with his horse handler edited out. The goal was to make himself seem more impressive and powerful [1]. These types of tricks can have significant impacts given the scale of people that see images like these, especially in the internet era. DARPA has an entire program constructed just to develop methods for detecting manipulated media through their media forensics (MEDIFOR) [2].

Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Don Beyer (D-VA) produced a deepfake video for the U.S. House Science subcommittee to demonstrate the threat such disinformation presents. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Don Beyer (D-VA) produced an artificial intelligence-doctored political video, or deepfake, for the U.S. House Science subcommittee to demonstrate the threat such disinformation presents. Lawmakers are worried of malefactors using deepfakes to disrupt and divide U.S. voters in the run-up to the 2020 election, and Waltz and Beyer are urging investment in deepfake-detection solutions, especially as production tools become increasingly affordable and accessible. State University of New York at Albany's Siwei Lyu, who helped craft the deepfake demo, said his software could generate deepfakes of a minute-long YouTube video in eight hours. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley's Hany Farid cited the sluggish progress of technology platforms like Facebook and Google to address deepfakes.