<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/30/dead-politicians-hit-the-campaign-trail-for-indias-billion-voter-election/>
"The 2024 elections in India are widely regarded as the largest in history,
with nearly a billion people eligible to cast a vote. Alongside the sheer human
scale, there’s another aspect of the Indian elections that is surprising for
its magnitude. This is the use of millions of deepfakes by Indian politicians
in an attempt to sway voters, a topic on the most recent
Ctrl-Alt-Speech
podcast. As Mike noted during the discussions there, it’s a relatively benign
kind of deepfake compared to some of the more nefarious uses that seek to
deceive and trick people. But an article on the
Rest of the World site points
out that the use of deepfakes by Indian politicians is pushing ethical
boundaries in other ways:
In January this year, M. Karunanidhi, the patriarch of politics in the
southern state of Tamil Nadu, first appeared in an AI video at a conference
for his party’s youth wing. In the clip, he wore the look for which he is
best remembered: a luminous yellow scarf and oversized dark glasses. Even
his head was tilted, just slightly to one side, to replicate a familiar
stance from real life. Two days later, he made another appearance at the
book launch of a colleague’s memoirs.
Karunanidhi died in 2018.
“The idea is to enthuse party cadres,” Salem Dharanidharan, a spokesperson
for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) — the party that Karunanidhi led
till his death — told me. “It excites older voters among whom Kalaignar
[“Man of Letters,” as Karunanidhi was popularly called] already has a
following. It spreads his ideals among younger voters who have not seen
enough of him. And it also has an entertainment factor — to recreate a
popular leader who is dead.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
