AI can influence voters' minds. What does that mean for democracy? AI chatbots may have the power to influence voters' opinions Does the persuasive power of AI chatbots spell the beginning of the end for democracy? In one of the largest surveys to date exploring how these tools can influence voter attitudes, AI chatbots were more persuasive than traditional political campaign tools including advertisements and pamphlets, and as persuasive as seasoned political campaigners. But at least some researchers identify reasons for optimism in the way in which the AI tools shifted opinions.

AI-generated content doesn't seem to have swayed recent European elections But there's still a risk it could in the future, say researchers. AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had no effect on election results in the UK, France, and the European Parliament this year, according to new research. Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors' ability to spread fake content with the potential to interfere with elections or even sway the results. Such worries were particularly heightened this year, when billions of people were expected to vote in over 70 countries. Those fears seem to have been unwarranted, says Sam Stockwell, the researcher at the Alan Turing Institute who conducted the study . He focused on three elections over a four-month period from May to August 2024, collecting data on public reports and news articles on AI misuse.

FOX News' Eben Brown reports that with the use of AI, scammers are fleecing Americans in more sophisticated ways. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday made AI-generated robocalls mimicking the voices of political candidates to fool voters illegal. With the unanimous adoption of a declaratory ruling that recognizes calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages, the FCC said it was giving state attorneys general new tools to go after those responsible for voice cloning scams. The decision was announced days after New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella revealed earlier this week that nefarious robocalls with an AI-generated clone of President Biden's voice urging recipients not to participate in the Jan. 23 primaries – and instead save their votes for the November election – had been traced to two Texas companies. Formella vowed potential civil and criminal action at the state and federal level.

Despite remarkable success in various applications, large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial jailbreaks that make the safety guardrails void. However, previous studies for jailbreaks usually resort to brute-force optimization or extrapolations of a high computation cost, which might not be practical or effective. In this paper, inspired by the Milgram experiment w.r.t. the authority power for inciting harmfulness, we disclose a lightweight method, termed DeepInception, which can easily hypnotize LLM to be a jailbreaker. Specifically, DeepInception leverages the personification ability of LLM to construct a novel nested scene to behave, which realizes an adaptive way to escape the usage control in a normal scenario. Empirically, our DeepInception can achieve competitive jailbreak success rates with previous counterparts and realize a continuous jailbreak in subsequent interactions, which reveals the critical weakness of self-losing on both open and closed-source LLMs like Falcon, Vicuna-v1.5, Llama-2, and GPT-3.5-turbo/4. Our investigation appeals to people to pay more attention to the safety aspects of LLMs and develop a stronger defense against their misuse risks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/DeepInception.

In today's digital age, images have emerged as powerful tools for politicians to engage with their voters on social media platforms. Visual content possesses a unique emotional appeal that often leads to increased user engagement. However, research on visual communication remains relatively limited, particularly in the Global South. This study aims to bridge this gap by employing a combination of computational methods and qualitative approach to investigate the visual communication strategies employed in a dataset of 11,263 Instagram posts by 19 Brazilian presidential candidates in 2018 and 2022 national elections. Through two studies, we observed consistent patterns across these candidates on their use of visual political communication. Notably, we identify a prevalence of celebratory and positively toned images. They also exhibit a strong sense of personalization, portraying candidates connected with their voters on a more emotional level. We note a substantial presence of screenshots from news websites and other social media platforms. Furthermore, text-edited images with portrayals emerge as a prominent feature. In light of these results, we engage in a discussion regarding the implications for the broader field of visual political communication. This article serves as a testament to the pivotal role that Instagram has played in shaping the narrative of two fiercely polarized Brazilian elections, casting a revealing light on the ever-evolving dynamics of visual political communication in the digital age. Finally, we propose avenues for future research in the realm of visual political communication. Introduction In the ever-evolving arena of election campaigns, candidates rely heavily on the media as their megaphone to amplify their messages to the masses. Over the years, the landscape of political communication has undergone a profound transformation. This transformation has been driven by the rise of online social media platforms, which have emerged as indispensable tools for candidates in their quest to gauge public sentiment and rally support from the electorate (Boulianne & Olof Larsson, 2023; Farkas & Bene, 2021). The significance of this transformation has been further accentuated by the global ascent of populist leaders, spanning diverse nations, who have wholeheartedly embraced social media as their primary mode of communication (Bernardi & Costa, 2020; Novoselova, 2020).

Conservative women are more attractive than left-wing females, according to a European study of thousands of faces. Danish and Swedish researchers tested a deep-learning artificial intelligence, called a neural network, that can predict a person's political leanings the majority of the time, based solely on their headshot. It found that right wing women more were attractive, based on a publicly available scoring system. The group found no such link in men, but did determine that the left-leaning men showed more neutral, less happy faces, suggesting perhaps better skill at guarding their emotions. The true purpose of the researchers' study, however, was to show the alarming accuracy of off-the shelf AI, which can correctly guess a person's political views based on limited information, like a simple selfie, posted to social media everyday.

Dating apps use AI algorithms to help match singles, and a new study finds the systems may be influencing users to swipe right on certain potential mates. Scientists in Spain wanted to find out what influences users, so they presented a group of test subjects with a series of fictitious suitors. Some of them were overtly promoted as highly compatible while other were favored more subtly--their photos just appeared more often. The researchers found participants were more likely to choose profiles that appeared frequently than those explicitly labeled as'an ideal partner.' This suggests people accept'scientific' advice for more intellectual subjects like politics, the researchers say, but prefer to go on intuition when it comes to romance.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talked with Matt Price of ZeroFox about the type of deep fakes circulating and their potential impact in the election cycle. The following is an edited transcript of their interview. Matt Price: Audio deepfakes are just synthetic audio usually trained on a certain person's voice, such as the CEO of a company, and then you're able to then feed text into that algorithm, which then generates the appropriate words using that person's synthetic voice. Video deepfakes, on the other hand, those are videos where you usually copy someone's face onto either an actor or just replace that original person's face, making them say something they never really said. So this can be very short spans of time.

Facebook said in March that it is making progress in addressing election abuse ahead of the U.S. midterms. Its efforts include expanding its fact-checking efforts and using artificial intelligence to block malicious accounts before they can spread misinformation.

Zittrain, J. Engineering an election – digital gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy.