We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation Is Not an AI Problem.

AI-generated misinformation was one of the top concerns during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In January 2024, the World Economic Forum claimed that “misinformation and disinformation is the most severe short-term risk the world faces” and that “AI is amplifying manipulated and distorted information that could destabilize societies.” News headlines about elections in 2024 tell a similar story. In contrast, in our past writing, we predicted that AI would not lead to a misinformation apocalypse. When Meta released its open-weight large language model (called LLaMA), we argued that it would not lead to a tidal wave of misinformation. And in a follow-up essay, we pointed out that the distributionof misinformation is the key bottleneck for influence operations, and while generative AI reduces the cost of creating misinformation, it does not reduce the cost of distributing it. A few other researchers have made similar arguments.