Brainstorm AI London 2024: Three Ways AI Is Already Impacting Political Campaigns

Fortune

Presenter: Julius van de Laar, Political Strategist and Communications Consultant, Van De Laar Campaigning

Transcript

00:00 Thanks for having me. Great. I thought we'll dive right in and talk about AI and political

00:06 campaigns. Who's excited about the upcoming US election? Anyone? Yes, I thought so, right?

00:10 A couple of people very hyped up. Obviously, a lot of things are happening, and not just

00:15 in the run-up to the election campaign, but anyone watching the news last night? Right?

00:20 Donald Trump is right here in the courtroom in New York City. And obviously, we've seen

00:25 these images many times before. You've seen this about a year ago, running away from the

00:30 cops. There's another one right there. He's getting restrained at the Donald. Now, of

00:37 course, these are deepfakes. Let me just put that disclaimer on there, and we'll be talking

00:41 about deepfakes, which is, of course, the big shiny thing in this election cycle. A

00:45 lot of people talk about deepfakes. But I thought, as we're getting into this courtroom

00:51 campaign that is unveiling right now, Donald Trump will not be televised, because New York

00:57 City law says you can't have cameras in the courtroom, unlike we do over here. But Donald

01:03 Trump obviously is creating the images himself. So if you move over to his Instagram feed,

01:08 you'll see pictures like this right here. Obviously, you guys can come up with what

01:13 the message might be, which is just like Jesus Christ. He is in there, taking it for us.

01:20 So that is, of course, not a real image. It's probably created by Midjourney or some other

01:26 AI tool. But I thought we'll get into this campaign. Now, it's two and a two days until

01:32 Election Day, November 5th. And when we take a look at the polls right now, New York Times

01:38 had a poll coming out this last weekend, and we see it's a pretty tight race. Trump is

01:43 still ahead. He was ahead about four or five points in April. Now, Biden is catching up.

01:48 It was probably some of that good spirit from the State of the Union address. But I thought,

01:52 you know, in a campaign where it's won by 44,000 votes, at least that was the margin

01:57 in 2020, you know, we can all sort of figure out this is going to be an incredibly tight

02:02 campaign. And it probably will come down to just a few votes in just a few counties in

02:07 just a few swing states. So AI might actually make the difference in this campaign. We're

02:12 going to talk about that in just a minute on a panel. But given the fact that AI politics

02:17 is already advancing, and given the fact that many votes have already been casted this year,

02:21 especially in the primaries, I thought we'll go back to the beginning of the year when

02:26 the Democratic primary took place in New Hampshire. Now, we all know who won the New Hampshire

02:31 primary for the Democrats. Who was it? It was the sitting president, of course. But

02:37 in the lead up to that vote, there were a couple of campaigns taking place, and one

02:43 of them was a robocall. Have you guys ever received a robocall? Many of you? Anyone from

02:49 the U.S. in this room? What state do you live in?

02:56 You haven't gotten a robocall, so you're probably not in a swing state. But if you're in a swing

03:00 state, chances are your phone is blowing up many times a day. You know, just a voice coming

03:04 online telling you, hey, this is Barack Obama, or this is Donald Trump, or this is surrogate

03:08 for the campaign. Please make sure you go out and vote. So I thought we'll listen in

03:12 to one of the robocalls that was placed right in the lead up to the New Hampshire campaign.

03:17 Take a listen.

03:18 What a bunch of malarkey. You know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count.

03:19 It's important that you save your vote for the November election. We'll need your help

03:20 in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans

03:21 in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November,

03:22 not just Tuesday.

03:23 So the message is pretty clear. Joe Biden is telling you to stay at home, right? And

03:47 you know, there are thoughts about Republicans being worried that Democrats might enter the

03:52 Republican primary. And so that robocall was placed. Now, did this make a big difference

03:57 in the vote? No, it didn't. I think it's a nice way of looking at how deepfakes might

04:02 impact the campaign. We can only imagine what might take place in a close election if you

04:07 might receive a robocall one day ahead of or on election day telling you to stay home

04:12 because there may have been a terrible car accident or bad weather coming up or what

04:16 have you. So we'll talk about that in a moment.

04:19 But I've got 36 seconds left, so I thought I'll talk about, you know, how easy it is

04:23 to create that. I understand we had the CEO from 11 Labs yesterday in Wire magazine actually

04:28 reported that the robocall you just heard was created with the tool 11 Labs. And so

04:34 when you take a look how easy it is, I'm not going to play it through, but you can actually

04:39 do it with the free version, upload a few soundbites from President Biden or President

04:44 Trump or any of you guys and actually create that deepfake in just a matter of moments.

04:49 So with that, I think we're going to switch over and talk about not only deepfakes, but

04:54 what's underneath and how it might impact this next election campaign. Thanks so much.

04:58 Thank you.

05:00 [Applause]

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