Targets of election deepfakes extend beyond the candidates [Video]

MINNEAPOLIS — When a deepfake robocall of President Biden urged New Hampshire residents to stay home during the primary election back in January, many wondered how something similar might be used to manipulate voters in the general election.

“It’s a question we’re getting every day, probably actually a few times a day given the prevalence of (deepfake) tools,” said Ben Colman, co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender, a company that uses artificial intelligence models to detect AI generation and manipulation in audio, video, images, and text.

Colman said he’s seen the amount of election-related deepfakes climb even more in recent weeks.

“We’re seeing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of social media accounts that themselves are deep faked accounts where the profile photo is fake, the media is fake and they’re being used to propagate and create a bit of an echo chamber to …