Deepfakes and artificial intelligence-powered attacks are making elections harder to safeguard, but don’t leave all of it to the election regulator.
AI was boosting misinformation, foreign interference and exacerbating threats on political figures, Australian Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday.
“It is a new threat that amplifies and accelerates existing threats to electoral integrity,” he said during Canberra hearings into the potentials and pitfalls of AI.
Mr Pope floated a legal requirement to label deepfakes, but stressed the AEC’s enforcement powers were limited by its “fine tuned” design.
It could tackle campaigning that was not properly authorised, educate the public and publish generalised debunks, but could only very rarely make truth determinations, the MPs and senators heard.
“The the more we’re asked to regulate and to make judgement, then there is a risk around that impartiality being challenged.”
He patiently stepped through the regulator’s powers as the committee threw him bizarre scenarios involving AI.
They included questions about deepfakes showing the prime minister giving “a bag of cash to someone dodgy” and biting the head off a puppy, suggested by WA MP Kate Chaney.
Mr Pope revealed the AEC did not have the power to contain that kind of content.
Misleading and deceptive information could be stopped only if it related to the casting of a vote, according to the commissioner.
“If it was a deepfake of a senior person in government saying ‘the only way your ballot paper will count is if you complete it this way: one here, two there’ – anything else won’t count,” he said.
Banning deepfakes entirely might also run afoul of Australia’s implied freedom of political communication, Mr Pope warned.
The committee also previously heard artists and AI companies might not need copyright law to change at all.
Instead, Canberra could interrogate whether there really is any need to train AI models in Australia, and let licensing markets evolve on their own, according to the Productivity Commission.
When asked about the economic upside to hosting cutting-edge “frontier models”, commission representative Stephen King replied: “That is an open question.”
It questions what the committee has repeatedly been told about Australia needing top-of-the-line bots and onshore training to reap the AI boom’s biggest benefits.
Training home-grown models may well require copyright law to change to either require tech giants to license content or give them a pass to use it at no cost, experts have testified.
“Copyright law would rule out the training of those models in this country, unless the party training those models licensed the relevant material,” Mr King affirmed to the MPs and senators on Wednesday.
The government could also hold out for artists and AI companies to strike deals on their own, which Mr King said was already happening.
“Three years – let the markets develop, if they haven’t developed, if there’s still a significant problem, then then we should start considering alternative solutions,” he said.
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