Operatives working for the Chinese and Iranian governments prepared fake, AI-generated content as part of a campaign to influence US voters in the closing weeks of the 2020 election campaign, current and former US officials briefed on the intelligence told CNN.
The Chinese and Iranian operatives never disseminated the deepfake audio or video publicly, but the previously unreported intelligence demonstrates concerns US officials had four years ago about the willingness of foreign powers to amplify false information about the voting process.
Now, with deepfake audio and video much easier to produce and the presidential election just six months away, US officials have grown more concerned over how a foreign influence campaign might exploit artificial intelligence to mislead voters.
At an exercise in the White House Situation Room last December in preparation for the 2024 election, senior US officials wrestled with how to respond to a scenario where Chinese operatives create a fake AI-generated video depicting a Senate candidate destroying ballots, as CNN has previously reported.
The NSA has continued to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries developing deepfakes and the potential threat they pose to US elections now that the technology has advanced dramatically over the last four years, the former senior official added, pointing out that in 2020, there wasn’t, for example, a large language model like ChatGPT that was easy to use.
“Other adversarial nations know that it is relatively easy and, frankly, cheap to try to interfere in our election,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s John Berman Wednesday morning.
“The fact that the Iranians pulled the Proud Boys crap but didn’t try deep fakes was either a lack of faith in the capabilities or a sign of no clear internal guidance,” one person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
The original article contains 1,065 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Chinese and Iranian operatives never disseminated the deepfake audio or video publicly, but the previously unreported intelligence demonstrates concerns US officials had four years ago about the willingness of foreign powers to amplify false information about the voting process.
Now, with deepfake audio and video much easier to produce and the presidential election just six months away, US officials have grown more concerned over how a foreign influence campaign might exploit artificial intelligence to mislead voters.
At an exercise in the White House Situation Room last December in preparation for the 2024 election, senior US officials wrestled with how to respond to a scenario where Chinese operatives create a fake AI-generated video depicting a Senate candidate destroying ballots, as CNN has previously reported.
The NSA has continued to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries developing deepfakes and the potential threat they pose to US elections now that the technology has advanced dramatically over the last four years, the former senior official added, pointing out that in 2020, there wasn’t, for example, a large language model like ChatGPT that was easy to use.
“Other adversarial nations know that it is relatively easy and, frankly, cheap to try to interfere in our election,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s John Berman Wednesday morning.
“The fact that the Iranians pulled the Proud Boys crap but didn’t try deep fakes was either a lack of faith in the capabilities or a sign of no clear internal guidance,” one person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
The original article contains 1,065 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!