According to her, “it takes half an hour to create a fake video with the help of artificial intelligence, and we have already noticed this trend in several EU member states. We do not have the data to estimate how radically this affected the election results. But if fakes were used en masse, we could forget about free and fair elections.”
On Tuesday, the EU published guidelines that major tech platforms subject to the bloc’s digital content rules should protect the public from online risks to elections, including fraud created by generative artificial intelligence. Deepfakes are artificially generated or staged images that can appear to be authentic.
“We call on digital actors, platforms where fakes can be found, to either flag them in some way or remove them,” V. Jourova said in an interview at Bloomberg’s office in Washington. “The closer to election day, the more important it would be to remove them.”
V. Jourova, who was in the US to talk to President Joe Biden’s administration about the risks of election meddling, said she had asked all European political parties, and through them all national political parties, to refrain from using artificial intelligence or deepfakes in election campaigns. . “We cannot rely on the behavior of digital actors,” she said.
The recommendations of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive authority, came just over two months before the European Parliament elections; in all, billions of people around the world will go to the polls this year. Guidelines for platforms tell them to assess the risk of each election, have content moderation teams in place, promote official information and clearly label any political advertising.
Under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, platforms with more than 45 million active users, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Google Search, must mitigate election-related risks.
For non-fulfillment of this requirement, they may be fined up to 6%. their annual income.
The EU has also put in place specific measures to avoid the risk of disinformation associated with generative artificial intelligence, in particular by clearly labeling deepfakes.
With the European Parliament elections just over two months away and billions of people around the world gearing up for the polls, EU guidelines seek to pressure major tech platforms to do their best to minimize online risks to elections, such as disinformation, foreign manipulation campaigns and fakes created by artificial intelligence. images.
V. Jourova said that the European Union will closely monitor the results of the US presidential elections in November. She said that if former President Donald Trump were to return to the White House, he should understand that the war in Ukraine has broader implications for democracies around the world.
“I hope that if Mr. When Trump becomes president, he will understand that this conflict, the war in Ukraine, is not just a war of Russia against Ukraine or a war between two countries in eastern Europe, but that it is Russian aggression against democracy,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin “can’t win it in any way “.
