Fact check: How AI influences election campaigns
Political parties use artificial intelligence to create alternative realities with emotional content designed to tug on our heartstrings or to scare us with frightening scenarios. How does that influence us?
A video shows a blue-eyed, blond man in a white shirt checking his ballot paper. Another scene in the same video shows a group of veiled women walking down the street. This video was published on the X account of the far-right AfD party in the eastern German state of Brandenburg ahead of state elections. A similar video has been viewed close to 900,000 times.
These videos try to appeal to our emotions by showing a scary future and offer simple solutions. None of the content is real — the videos have been created with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
This content can be produced quickly — and it's cheap and easy. Compared to other, more elaborate AI videos, it's quite easy to spot that these videos are fake. But if that's the case, why are they created? DW Fact check looked into this phenomenon of so-called softfakes.
