Days after New Hampshire voters received a robocall with an artificially generated voice that resembled President Joe Biden's, the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls. The 2024 United States election would be the first to unfold amid wide public access to AI generators, which let people create images, audio and video – some for nefarious purposes. Institutions rushed to limit AI-enabled misdeeds. Sixteen states enacted legislation around AI's use in elections and campaigns; many of these states required disclaimers in synthetic media published close to an election. The Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency supporting election administrators, published an "AI toolkit" with tips election officials could use to communicate about elections in an age of fabricated information.

Bluesky, which has surged in the days following the US election, said on Friday that it won't train on its users' posts for generative AI. The declaration stands in stark contrast to the AI training policies of X (Twitter) and Meta's Threads. Probably not coincidentally, Bluesky's announcement came the same day X's new terms of service, allowing third-party partners to train on user posts, went into effect. "A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data," Bluesky posted (via The Verge) on Friday. "We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so."

Ears perked up across the tech sector as US vice president Kamala Harris spoke the words "quantum computing" during a presidential debate in September – the first mention of the term by any US presidential candidate. It was brief but signalled that science and technology are playing a key role in the contest for the presidency. Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are both relatively known quantities, each having spent four recent years in the White House.

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When the generative AI boom kicked off, one of the biggest concerns was that hyperrealistic deepfakes could be used to influence elections. But new research from the Alan Turing Institute recently found that AI-generated falsehoods seem to have had no effect on election results around the world so far this year. However, one of the most consequential elections of the year is still ahead of us. In just over a month, Americans will head to the polls to choose Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as their next president. And, so far, external state actors are relying far more heavily on old tried-and-tested tactics than newfangled AI tools to interfere.

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.

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union's list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine. In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the "Good Old USA Project." The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full time team dedicated to the cause. On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the last two years been targeting Ukraine, and more recently, the US elections.

While Elon Musk officially endorsed former president Donald Trump in the wake of Saturday's assassination attempt, Grok, the "anti-woke" AI chatbot integrated into Musk's X platform, is boosting claims that Trump is "a pedophile" and "a wannabe dictator." The chatbot also refers to Trump as "Psycho." This is based on an analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Global Witness, a non-profit that investigates digital threats, which looked at Grok's responses to queries about the US election. Global Witness found that, in addition to referring to Trump as "Psycho," the bot also appeared to invent racist tropes about Kamala Harris, surface widely debunked election conspiracy theories, and recommend that users post biased hashtags such as #WeBackBidenHarris2024 and #VoteReform for engagement. "Grok would reference or surface tweets which included toxic language, conspiracy theories and problematic tropes," Ellen Judson, senior investigator and lead researcher on this project, tells WIRED.

On January 21, Patricia Gingrich was about to sit down for dinner when her landline phone rang. The New Hampshire voter picked up and heard a voice telling her not to vote in the upcoming presidential primary. "As I listened to it, I thought, gosh, that sounds like Joe Biden," Gingrich told Al Jazeera. "But the fact that he was saying to save your vote, don't use it in this next election -- I knew Joe Biden would never say that." The voice may have sounded like the United States president, but it wasn't him: It was a deepfake, generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Microsoft and Google's AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked "Who won the 2020 US presidential election?" Microsoft's chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4, responds by saying: "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." It then tells users to search on Bing instead. When the same question is asked of Google's Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google's own large language model of the same name, it responds: "I'm still learning how to answer this question."