Hello, Fortune tech editor Alexei Oreskovic here. We're less than a year away from the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and there's growing anxiety about the potential for new and widely accessible generative AI tools to wreak havoc on the process. Fortune's Jeremy Kahn first wrote about the issue back in April—not much has happened to address the problem since then although awareness about the issue is rising.
That was clear at Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference which took place in San Francisco this week. Several speakers at the event weighed in on the issue with varying degrees of alarm.
"I'm deeply skeptical of what's going to happen in '24, I think it's going to be a total shit show in terms of misinformation," said Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, warning of an onslaught of domestic and foreign entities dedicated to influencing the outcome.
He blasted social media platforms X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook for having "gutted" trust and safety teams—the groups that are tasked with policing the platforms for misinformation—and he dismissed federal regulatory oversight as a joke.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman said he was "very concerned" about bad actors using AI to interfere in the election. While some—including the White House with President Joe Biden's recent executive order on AI—have touted watermarking technology as a solution for authenticating legitimate images and videos from AI-generated deepfakes, Hoffman was skeptical. The structure for watermarking technology needs to be set up by the companies that oversee AI models, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. But those are not the only AI models available.
"The Russians will be running open source models that don't have that watermarking requirement," he said.
Vinod Khosla, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and one of the most influential Silicon Valley investors, reckoned there was a 95% chance that generative AI would be influential in the upcoming election. Describing something that sounds straight out of a science fiction movie, Khosla offered his view on what this might look like:
"I'd be surprised if there aren't 100 million or more bots, with persuasive AI, one-on-one engaging with every voter trying to influence our election for their purposes."
On that cheery note, here's what else is going on in tech today.
Alexei Oreskovic
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