Digital deception? Indian political parties embrace deepfakes for 2024 Lok Sabha Election campaigns

livemint.com:

Al Jazeera report, teams across India’s political parties, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Congress, are deploying deepfakes to influence voters. In recent months, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which governs Tamil Nadu, has used AI to resurrect its iconic leader M Karunanidhi from the dead, using lifelike videos of the former movie writer and veteran politician at campaign events. Between March and May, India’s nearly one billion voters will pick their next national government in the world’s, and history’s, biggest elections.

Let's take a look at how and why political parties are grasping at this technological marvel for their gains. Noam Chomsky in his magnum opus had pointed out how media, especially in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. While AI failed to gain prominence in Chomsky's book, we cannot really differentiate between the both, considering the rapid technological evolution that the world has witnessed.

The BJP has been at the forefront of using illusions for campaigning. As far back as 2012, the party used 3D hologram projections of Modi so that he could simultaneously “campaign" in dozens of places at the same time. The strategy was deployed widely during the 2014 general elections that brought Modi to power.