The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer

Before the start of India’s general election in April, a top candidate looking to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not out wooing voters on the campaign trail. He was in jail. Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and the head of a political party known for its anti-corruption platform, was arrested in late March for, yes, alleged corruption. His supporters hit the streets in protest, decrying the arrest as a politically motivated move by Modi aimed at weakening a rival. (Kejriwal has maintained his innocence, and the Indian government has denied that politics played a role.)

Soon after the arrest, Kejriwal implored his supporters to stay strong. “There are some forces who are trying to weaken our country and its democracy,” he said in a 34-second audio clip posted to social media by a fellow party member. “We need to identify those forces and fight them.” It was not Kejriwal’s actual voice, but rather a convincing AI voice clone reading a message that the real Kejriwal had written from behind bars. A couple of days later, Modi’s supporters mocked Kejriwal’s misfortune by sharing their own AI response: a montage of images in which Kejriwal is strumming a guitar from inside a prison cell, singing a melancholic Hindi song. In classic AI fashion, there are mangled fingers and a pastiche of human faces.

Throughout this election cycle—which ended yesterday in a victory for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party after six weeks of voting and more than 640 million ballots cast—Indians have been bombarded with synthetic media. The country has endured voice clones, convincing fake videos of dead politicians endorsing candidates, automated phone calls addressing voters by name, and AI-generated songs and memes lionizing candidates and ridiculing opponents. But for all the concern over how generative AI and deepfakes are a looming “atomic bomb” that will warp reality and alter voter preferences, India foreshadows a different, stranger future.

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