♪♪
-Hello. I’m your host, Brian Callanan.
State leaders are sounding the alarm on deepfakes,
false political ads that are now using artificial intelligence
to influence voters.
In January, New Hampshire voters got a call
from an AI generated president, Joe Biden,
telling them to skip the primary election.
-We’re really seeing just how easy it is
to kind of commandeer somebody’s voice
or commandeer somebody’s image
and make them say whatever you want.
-Authorities say an election deepfake
has not hit Washington State yet.
But they’re concerned AI is the next step
in a disturbing trend of political misinformation.
Just last year, four county elections offices
were targeted with envelopes
containing white powder and had to evacuate.
-And when we see information and deepfakes going around
that sow public distrust in elections,
it really stokes that fire of threats and aggressive behavior.
-But state lawmakers are fighting back.
-This is about protecting our democracy.
-State Senate Bill 5152, passed last year,
now requires campaigns to disclose
when AI generated or synthetic media
is used in their commercials.
-And if you are gonna use synthetic media in your ads,
it has to be actually right there
in the ad and say what it is,
so folks know it’s not quite what you think it is.
-With a presidential race
and three statewide elections this year,
the new law faces a new test.
-Just because it hasn’t happened yet,
doesn’t mean it can’t.
-Combating deepfakes this election season.
This week on "City/Inside Out."
♪♪
And welcome once again to "City/Inside Out."
I’m Brian Callanan.
I have with me some very important people to talk
about this very important issue of election deepfakes.
First off, we have with us Kate Starbird, the director
and co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center
for an Informed Public.
Kate, thanks for being here. -Thanks for inviting me.
-All right, we also have with us
Washington’s secretary of state, Steve Hobbs.
Good to see you again, Secretary Hobbs.
-Good to see you, Brian. -All right, here we go.
Secretary Hobbs, maybe I can start with you on this.
You said recently this AI generated voice
pretending to be President Biden with New Hampshire voters
there is just the tip of the iceberg.
What sort of election threats
do you think we’re going to be facing in 2024?
What kind of impact could they have?
-Well, if we’re dealing with AI,
it certainly can be a fake robocall.
It can also be a Tele-Town Hall.
I mean, that’s not unusual for elected officials.
I did it as a state senator.
And you can, uh, you can go into this Tele-Town Hall
and you can think it’s the person, but it’s not.
I mean, that could that could definitely happen.
There could be a digital ad of like,
my face telling you to vote on Wednesday instead of Tuesday.
These are all very possible out there.
And that’s just the AI, not to mention
all the other misinformation that’s going on.
-And I guess the overall impact of it
and your concerns about this,
what is that overarching?
-It causes more doubts and it causes people
to lose confidence in their democracy.
And unfortunately, not only are we dealing
with people in our own country,
we are dealing with strategic threats outside our country.
And so we need to be aware of this
and hopefully programs like yours can help us.
-Yeah, well, we will see what we can do.
Thank you very much for that.
Kate, I want to have you tell us
a little bit more about what the center
for an Informed Public is all about,
and what you’re preparing for in 2024.
-University of Washington Center for an Informed Public.
We set up our -- I think, we were founded in 2019
just in time for the pandemic and election 2020.
Yeah, um, accidentally.
But our center looks to do both research to understand
the problem of misinformation and disinformation,
as well as education and outreach
to help educate people about what these problems are
and what they can do about them.
And we do some policy work as well.
And our mission is really to understand
and address strategic misinformation
and manipulation of online spaces
and to support democratic discourse.
-Got it, and in 2024,
a big focus would be -- what are your thoughts?
-We’re doing a lot of work around understanding
and communicating about misinformation
and disinformation, so intentional...
-Disinformation is intentional.
-Intentional content that seeks to sort of undermine trust
in election processes and procedures,
as well as to confuse people about when and where to vote
and possibly disenfranchise voters.
-Got it. Let’s try to talk about some of the answers here.
Maybe in Secretary Hobbs, let’s talk about this bill
you requested in the state legislature passed last year,
Senate Bill 5152, Washington, one of the first states
to have something like this on the books.
An election deepfakes law.
It requires campaigns to disclose
when they’re using AI generated video,
let’s say synthetic video images or audio.
How is this going to work?
-So just backing up a little bit,
I knew I could see this threat coming.
We saw that happen in Ukraine
when the Russians invaded.
There was a deepfake of Zelensky
that just -- that’s very aggressive,
very threatening, it could happen here.
And so we wanted to get ahead of this.
So we ran this bill,
it basically says you have to have disclosure.
There’s a private right of action.
But to be honest with you, Brian,
I would like it to be a little more stronger.
I would like to hold social media companies accountable.
Networks accountable.
Because if you’re taking in money to run an ad,
you should know who that person is.
You should know if that’s a deepfake,
you should know if there was permissions involved
to allow that image to be used.
Um, well, we can try again.
-Yeah, yeah, but that’s kind of
where the bill is sitting right now.
And in terms of what it actually does,
it’s basically, uh, civil actions are possible
if people see these things and they’re not reported.
Is that the way this works? -That is correct.
So you can go after somebody that runs a deepfake.
Now, the problem is, if you had a nation state actor
doing a -- doing this,
it’s going to be really hard to get to go after them,
which is why we need to hold the some
of the social media companies accountable.
-Got it, thank you for that, Kate,
I just wanted to talk about this.
2024 is going to be the first test of this,
I guess, in our state.
Is this going to help or what do you think?
-Every little every little bit helps.
Um, but, you know,
advertisements are only one part of the problem.
A lot of the content that we’re seeing that’s misleading,
that’s outright fake or just accidentally misleading
is not coming through advertisements.
It’s coming through just everyday people
sharing content, um,
and even things that, you know, won’t even
look like advertisements, they may be paid,
but people are putting in there in nefarious ways.
And so I think it addresses a part of the problem.
But the problem is much bigger than that.
-Yeah. -And in 2024,
I think we’ve got a double-edged sword of people
are beginning to recognize that there’s so many, uh,
misleading things out there and we recognize the threat,
but we don’t know what to do about it.
And so we’re just losing trust in the information space
as well as in the democratic process at the same time.
And our challenge is really to figure out
not how to distrust everything,
but figure out what we can trust and what we should trust.
And that’s something that I think
we’re all working on. -Yes, Steve.
-So one of the things that we’re trying to do
in this office is scan social media.
So we use logically is what we contract with,
scan social media for, um,
for leading messages that are out there,
the dealing with elections.
And so if we find something, for example, for um,
let’s say, uh, there’s a message that’s saying
that, uh, elections are hacked.
-Yeah. -Well, then we can turn around
and put our own social media posts,
contact the media like yourself
and other news agencies and let them know.
It’s like, "Did you know that the tabulation machines
are not connected to the internet?"
This is not true.
You cannot hack into our elections.
Um, that’s the real threat right now.
AI is something that it’s gonna happen.
It’s emerging, but, um...
Gates right. -Yeah.
-Um, what we’re dealing with right now is a huge problem.
35% of Washingtonians did not trust the election.
Right, according to the King Five poll last year.
So trying to put that genie back in the bottle
is really hard. -And if you look
at it, 2020, we already had this proliferation
of false and misleading claims about the election.
We didn’t really have --
the deepfakes now are far more sophisticated
they were in 2020, we don’t need deepfakes.
We got cheap fakes.
And that’s enough to cause a lot of issues.
And so I think, you know,
um, this is gonna be a challenge.
It’s good to hear that you all are trying to
to do something about addressing that.
I think, you know, you’re gonna possibly hear pushback
for doing that kind of activity in scanning.
And I think it’s good to clarify.
Yeah, it’s good to clarify that when you mean scanning,
you’re not looking to to call out individuals
or to track people, you just want to understand
what are the false claims that are spreading
so you can get your accurate information out into the world.
And I think it’s, you know, really important
that you’re able to understand what the rumors are,
so election officials can get the --
the corrective information out into the world.
-Absolutely, and all we’re doing is,
looking at what’s already out there in public.
Um, and because this is how it spread.
-Yeah. -And if there’s any way
to just combat misinformation,
disinformation with the truth,
'cause that’s basically what we’re doing.
We’re telling people, "Hey, look, the tabulation machines
aren’t connecting the internet and oh, by the way,
if you don’t trust us, go to the county auditor,
actually see the tabulation machine."
-Right, and I think it goes beyond
just voter trust in terms of the impact of this.
And, Kate, maybe I can start with you here.
I think about this because your research,
you’ve been grilled by Congress, you’ve been threatened,
you’ve faced some legal challenges, etcetera.
And I don’t mean to pry over much here,
but I did want to talk about this.
What’s this been like for you and your coworkers
to be at the center of this big fight over information?
-Yeah, I mean, we’re at the center,
but it is a big, big fight, and actually, if you look,
some of the things that are happening this week,
there’s researchers across our field
are getting targeted by these efforts to frame work,
to just understand the problem of misinformation
and disinformation,
to twist that into this frame of censorship,
which it’s not.
It’s absolutely like a strategic effort
to redefine what censorship means
so that people like us
aren’t even able to help people out there in the world
try to find information that is, you know,
that can correct these inaccuracies.
And it’s been an interesting year.
Um, I feel like our team has showed a lot of courage,
a lot of bravery through this.
Certainly we’ve talked about a chilling effect
on researchers -- internally, we’re not feeling that.
We’ve got students knocking on our doors
to come work on things, I have students coming out
of, like, they’d stepped out of school,
they want to come back and do the work
because they feel it’s so important.
And we’re trying to just
kind of leverage that energy and --
and continue to work in a similar way
to kind of understand what are the rumors out there
and just try to help people resolve those rumors.
And one of the things I want to point out
is, like, rumors aren’t necessarily false.
You know, sometimes rumors turn out to be true.
A lot of times they turn out to be false.
But even when they’re false,
they have interesting information
about what people are confused about,
about what their fears are and those kinds of things.
And if we can understand what rumors are spreading,
we can help the people spreading them.
Get that information, get that clarifying information,
reduce that uncertainty and that anxiety,
and hopefully not be disenfranchised.
-One thing that Secretary of States are doing
and election officials are doing
is we are giving more information out.
So, in the past, we’ve been very good about telling the voters,
"Don’t forget to vote." -Yeah.
-Don’t forget to put your ballot in the drop box.
Now we have to tell them, "Hey, don’t forget
to put your ballot in the drop box,
but also, did you know we’re part of
E.R.I.C the electronic registration information center.
So if you move to another state and you register there,
we’re gonna know about it, we’re gonna know when you die
so that if a ballot shows up after you’re dead,
we know that it’s probably not your ballot. So.
But people don’t know these things
because we have taken elections for granted.
We election officials have,
and we need to change that.
-I just wanted to follow up with the impacts here.
I know Kate and her crew has been going through a lot,
but think about election workers, too.
We had these four county elections offices
that had to be evacuated last year.
Someone sent in envelopes with white powder.
Two tested positive for the deadly drug fentanyl here.
I guess, what do you have to say to election workers
who are trying to do their jobs,
but feeling more and more pressure
from this political disinformation out there?
-You know, I served in the military,
I still serve in the National Guard,
and I served overseas during elections in Kosovo and Iraq,
and our lives were being threatened.
I never thought that would happen here.
I equate our election workers to the same
as the fellow soldiers I worked with,
because they’re being threatened.
Um, when you’re working to just separate the envel--
the ballot from the, um -- from the envelope,
that shouldn’t be a security risk, right?
-Right. -And now it is,
and so we’re trying to push some bills through the legislature
and make it a class C felony.
We’re trying to provide more funding for election centers
to increase their physical security,
increase their cybersecurity,
to ensure things like we have wash stations in there
so that if white powder comes out,
if it’s, you know, bad, it could be fentanyl,
it could be whatever... -Sure.
-...there’s a way to wash that out.
So we have to up our game unfortunately
because of the threats out there.
-Yeah, yeah. I wanted to switch gears a little bit
and talk to people about how you can tell
if a message or a video is a deepfake.
Is it AI-generated?
We’re going to play a little game here
that your compatriots at the U-Dub put together,
and I’ll try to make the guesses here as best I can.
We’ll show people at home what we’re looking at here.
So the idea is you got to click on the face that is real.
And I’ve been looking through these,
and these are kind of tough.
I know these are difficult for everybody.
Uh, I’m going to hazard a guess.
Um, person on the left.
Can we click on that? Oh, incorrect.
The person on the right is the real one. Doggone.
All right, I’m going to try playing again here.
Uh, all right, I think -- I think I got this.
So looking at this guy on the left,
he’s got that little glint above his glasses there.
That seems to be a tell for me.
So I’m going to say the person on the right is real.
Did I get this right? Yes.
Okay. That’s one. Maybe one more, just, uh --
and we’ll have you guys throw out a guess here.
Uh, any thoughts on this one?
Boy, it’s difficult to tell sometimes, isn’t it?
-This is very difficult. -Um...
-Look at the ears and the teeth, are usually a giveaway.
-...are good tells. -We can't -- in one case,
we can’t see the ears and the teeth, and it’s harder.
-The teeth look a little almost too perfect
on the left here.
I’m going to say the person on the right is real.
Am I close? Did I get it?
Ah, doggone it.
I -- I guess I wanted to play that game with you because --
-It's hard. -Because it’s difficult,
and I think the technology is changing.
You were mentioning that some of the technology
that your UW colleagues were using has been updated since.
I mean, what’s that like to try to keep up
with all this technology?
-Well, you know, that’s -- it’s almost an arms race
between the technologies that are building the generative AI
and the technologies that can help detect it.
And, you know, generative AI has a lot of interesting uses,
but it’s really important for us as humans to be able to tell
what’s -- what’s generated by generative AI
and what is human-generated.
And right now, we have very few signals
about what’s being, um -- what’s being, you know --
what’s synthetic or created by these computers.
And then we can be misled in interesting ways.
I think, you know, the legal changes and policies
are going to help with that,
but there’s just a vast distance
between the quality of this generative AI
and our ability as humans to figure out what is real
and what is computer-generated.
-Secretary Hobbs, this -- this increasing amount
of technology we’re dealing with, it’s a lot.
-Yes. So, you know, being in the military, being --
having served in military intelligence at one point,
it’s like the technology, you know,
it can be good or evil, right?
And AI can certainly --
certainly fits both of those molds.
But what -- the problem I face in government
is having policy catch-up with this technology.
Now that bill that you had mentioned
dealing with deepfakes,
even though I couldn’t get everything I wanted,
it took three years to get that passed.
And one of the issues that I ran into,
not just the social media companies
that had very high-paid lobbyists,
but the fact that there were people out there,
legislators who felt,
"Oh, you’re infringing on a First Amendment right.
"This is free speech."
It’s like, so you have to bridge that gap.
It’s like, really? Is it free speech
that you have this generated image of me
that I gave no permission to,
to say information that’s not true.
That’s free speech? -Mm-hmm.
-I mean, some people feel it that way, right?
And that is -- that’s a policy argument.
-Right. -That’s hard to overcome.
-And I wanted to get into that because that policy argument
turns into something, I think, a little more personal.
You’ll see a post out there that’s incorrect,
and maybe someone who posts continually
incorrect information,
even after people have debunked
that those lies or whatever else.
How do you deal with that? Do you engage with that person?
Do you say, "Hey, I’m correcting every Tweet
"that you have out there"?
Because I know there are some people
who are watching the show like,
"Oh, man, I want to do that."
But is that the right approach, Kate?
-Well, I started studying online rumors about 2013,
and for a couple of years on Facebook and other places,
I was just like, "Let me try out --" We studied corrections.
"Let me try out what it means
"to correct people in online spaces."
I lost a lot of Facebook friends.
-Yeah.
-So it’s not a good idea if you --
especially with folks that you want to maintain relationships
with that you’re not super close with, you know,
just, you know, correcting them in online spaces,
how you do that and when you do that, I think,
is something to really think about.
If it’s someone who’s really close to you
and you care about,
don’t correct them publicly.
Maybe have a private conversation,
maybe, like -- maybe an in-person conversation
and kind of talk about things
and how maybe there might be other information
that they -- they could see that could help them see things --
-Give them a different perspective, yeah.
-If it’s someone that you don’t know very well,
you have to think about, you’re not going to correct them.
They’re going to anchor in what they thought before,
and you’re just going to make them mad.
You’re actually correcting their audiences.
You’re correcting that information for their audiences.
So if you approach it in that way,
think about how do we -- how you do this in a respectful way
that’s more about getting their audiences
to be able to see this alternative viewpoint
that is a correction.
And we’ve actually made some progress
with some of our researchers studying these truth queries,
where you don’t actually even say "You’re wrong."
You just ask a question --
"Oh, where did you get that information?"
And, "How do you know that?"
And that can be the beginning of a conversation
that puts some doubt in --
in the thread for other people to see.
So there’s those -- just -- if you’re going to do it,
do it in a nuanced way and with kind of empathy.
We all -- we all have shared something
that’s false accidentally online.
And so when you’re correcting someone,
have that empathy as well.
-All right, well, it sounds like Kate solved the internet here.
Secretary, can you tell me what your office is doing
or what your approach is when you see these continual lies?
-Sure. We -- We don’t engage
because they’ll just tend to dig in.
So what we do is we see what the trends are, right?
So I gave you that example.
We see these messages out.
So it’s what’s trending is, you know, again,
people hacking the internet or something.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. -Hacking an election.
So then we know, "Well, okay, we will put out messages."
We’re not directing at those people,
but we’re putting out a general message.
We’re contacting the media.
We’re letting people know, "Hey, that’s not true."
Um, and depending on the -- the organization or the person,
if they have a lot of influence,
maybe it’s a chance to reach out
and go, "Hey, um, --"
Kate, you brought it up. It’s great --
"Where did you get this information?
"I’d love to be able to research this and analyze it.
"I mean, you know, I don’t want the fraudulent elections,
"so, you know, let me try to help you.
"And in the meantime, love for you to come down
"and check out the county auditor
"and see what they’re doing," right?
And that’s the way you approach it,
because when you attack somebody on their messaging,
you’re -- you’re attacking --
you’re almost attacking their personality, right?
You’re attacking their psyche. -Right.
-That’s why people dig in. -Mm-hmm.
-Um, and so the way to counter is give people more information.
-Yeah. Is there a way to be proactive?
I mean, that’s -- that’s very reactive
to a message that’s out there.
I’m hoping that programs like this
can be part of the proactive piece of it.
But is there another way to act proactively
to try to cut that off before it starts?
What do you got?
-One of the things we’ve been doing
is sort of studying past trends, especially in specifically
around election processes and results,
past trends of rumors and conspiracy theories,
to kind of see, you know,
what kinds of things have been out there before,
because it turns out that this year’s conspiracy theories
are going to look a lot like last year’s,
because there’s a lot of repetition
of those kinds of things.
And also to think about the parts
of the election process that cause confusion,
that have been targeted for false claims before,
and then proactively think of, like,
what kind of information do we need to stage
to get ready to, you know,
either very quickly correct falsehoods
or even in advance help people really see the layers
of security in the process that are going to counter
these things that are going to show up.
So we’ve been trying to kind of do that work.
We’ve talked to some election officials
and just kind of gotten an idea of what might help.
And I think, you know, being a little proactive
of what people might expect, and --
and we call "prebunking" different kinds of narratives
that we expect and really building --
We see all these, like, frames of election fraud
and these kinds of things, really,
but, like, instead of debunking every little thing,
how do you build, like, a better understanding
of election security
and let people really know how -- what those layers are?
-Yeah, and Secretary Hobbs, just going to follow up on that.
Some thoughts about being proactive.
Can you prevent something
like that robo-call from President Biden
happening here, or...?
I’m just trying to figure out what you do.
-We probably can't prevent it from coming out,
but as I tell people, the best way to combat this
is with the truth and getting the word out.
And so that’s why we have totally shifted
the way we’ve put the messages out about elections.
Again, it can’t be just about reminding people to vote.
It’s about telling them the voting process,
telling them things about just, you know, like ERIC,
the Electronic Registration Information Center.
-Yep, yep.
-That we verify every signature,
those things that we have taken for granted.
We have put out $1.2 million of, you know, public information
that we did in '22 and then '23,
and then we’re going to continue on
because we have to do that now.
We have to try to get ahead of this.
And not only is it the high level through TV ads, radio ads,
but it’s at the grassroots level.
It’s going out to communities of color,
immigrant communities in their language
so that they understand it because they are also vulnerable
to mis and disinformation.
-Great point. I got about a minute to spare on this,
but social media companies, have they been helpful here?
Have they been interactive with you at all?
Secretary Hobbs. -They’re a little bit --
They’re -- They’re polarized right now
because they’re, you know -- they’re driven by money,
and so they’re trying to get market share.
We do have communications with them,
mostly with Facebook, not really with X.
I’d love to work with them
because if we see something that could be a foreign actor,
you know, we probably would tell them if we saw that.
Now luckily, we have -- we’re doing a lot of work
with Homeland Security, the FBI.
And so, you know, we tell them if we suspect something.
Usually they find it before we do.
But I’d like to have more cooperation with them,
and especially getting a bill through
that it has more teeth in it.
-Right. Kate, what’s it been like
dealing with the social media companies?
-Well, I think if you look at -- at some of the --
There’s been a politicization of the efforts
to stop mis and disinformation about elections,
and that politicization has, for various reasons,
you know, caused the social media companies to back away,
even from things they were doing in 2020,
to try to address mis and disinformation about elections.
And -- and I think they feel really hesitant to, um --
to communicate with government,
to even communicate with academic researchers,
I would say.
My inbox used to be full of so many,
so much outreach from these companies.
I couldn’t possibly keep up with it.
And now, it's just -- it's just not happening.
Additionally, the social media ecosystem
is far more fragmented than it was four years ago.
There’s so many different webs--
you know, so many different platforms out there.
Whether it’s TikTok, Telegram, X, Facebook, YouTube,
there’s just so many.
And so that kind of communication
between all the local and state of election officials
and all the different platforms,
it’s just a real messy space,
especially when just the act of communicating
is politicized and called,
you know, accused -- accusations of censorship
get leveraged just for those folks
to communicate to each other.
-Thank you for all this.
I need to wrap up, and I can give you about a minute.
Kate, I just wanted to give some final thoughts to voters.
I don’t want this program to scare anybody.
I know you don’t want to do that either,
but hopefully, you open eyes for people
to the potential deepfakes that are out there
with the elections ahead.
What do you want to leave voters with?
-Well, I think it’s really important that we don’t,
you know, lose our sense of agency in the world.
And I really think it’s important
that we don’t just lose trust in all information
and back away from these spaces.
The real quest is, like,
how do we engage thoughtfully on social media --
and in other conversations as well --
but how do we engage thoughtfully in social media?
And one of the things I tell people to do is,
first of all, there’s the SIFT method.
So that is a set of kind of easy steps
that you can take to be able to kind of verify
that what you’re -- what you’re seeing is accurate.
And the second one I just want to tune in
is, like, often when we’re manipulated,
when we start to share misinformation,
it’s not that someone’s tricked us up here.
It's that we’ve been activated emotionally.
So really, one of the first things I tell people to do
is tune in to how information makes you feel emotionally.
And if you feel like you’ve been -- like you’re angry,
you’re mad, you’re ready to spike the political football,
maybe step back and look for that flag on the field,
that misinformation flag on the field.
Really kind of --
I think that tuning into emotions
is almost more important
than thinking about all the rules of checking
whether something is a deepfake or not.
-Thank you. Some final thoughts here, Secretary.
-Oh, Kate brought good points there,
but additionally, I would say pause, right?
You see a social media post.
Maybe verify it.
Who is this person that’s sending it to you?
Do you know this person?
And don’t share it immediately, right?
So if you do those things, well, I tell you, maybe we can --
maybe we can lower the amount of mis and disinformation
that’s out there if just people would pause.
-Okay. I am hoping very much for that.
Thank you both for joining me, and we will be right back.
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Great to have that input.
Thank you very much for your input, too.
We will see you next time on "City/Inside Out."
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