By The Herald Editorial Board
The past week — in which the state’s primary election launched the three-month period before a pivotal general election on Sept. 5 — highlighted the threat level as both misinformation (unintentionally false) and disinformation (engineered to deceive) continued to dog American voters and the United States’ state-run election systems.
Friday, researchers at Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center announced in a new report that Iran and Russia were stepping up their long-running influence campaigns, launching cyber attacks and disinformation against U.S. election systems and attempts to sway voters — on the right and left — using AI and computer-generated content and “seeding online personas and websites into the information space.”
U.S. intelligence officials issued similar warnings earlier this year about the use of AI deepfakes and robocalls in such disinformation efforts from Russia and China.
Yet, it’s not just foreign countries seeking to sow chaos; some of the attacks are coming from “inside the house.”
Earlier this week — the day before the primary, in fact — five secretaries of state, the state officials responsible for assuring access to and integrity of their elections, including Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs — wrote Elon Musk, owner of the social media site X (formerly Twitter), to raise their concerns about election misinformation that an X chatbot had generated and transmitted to millions.
Following President Biden’s announcement last month that he was stepping down from his reelection campaign and had endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, X’s artificial intelligence tool, dubbed Grok and promoted by Musk as an “anti-woke” chatbot, told its X premium subscribers — falsely — that because of the late switch in candidates Harris had missed the deadline to have her name placed on general election ballots in nine states, including Washington state. While initially shared only with X’s premium subscribers, Grok’s post was shared elsewhere, reaching millions of people.
When alerted to the misinformation, it took X 10 days — between July 21 and July 31 — to correct its chatbot, allowing the spread of the false information to continue during that period.
In their letter to Musk, the officials noted that “inaccuracies are to be expected for any AI products, especially chatbots based on large language models,” recognizing the bugs in a developing technology but attempting to make the point of the need for additional scrutiny and monitoring of such technology. But that fallibility seems to be better understood by the election officials than it is by Musk, who when it was launched, said he wanted Grok to be unfiltered and “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems,” The Washington Post reported.
The week before, Musk shared a video on his own X account that used an AI voice-cloning tool to mimic the voice of Harris to say things she had not said, including that she was a “diversity hire” and didn’t know “the first thing about running the country.” The original video had been clearly marked as parody, an Associated Press report said, a distinction that Musk did not note on his post when he first shared it.
Adding to the problem, X, Facebook and other social media sites have greatly reduced the workforce of employees who would fact-check posts and respond to misinformation.
Musk’s reported response to the election officials’ concerns, said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s secretary of state, was “the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Dismissive and detached.”
Which may be an improvement in behavior for Musk, who for a time was responding to questions from journalists with a single poop emoji.
As promised, “spicy.”
But not responsive and not taking seriously the care that dissemination of information — especially election-related information — requires of any source of news and information, especially one with the range and breadth of social media.
“The owners of social media platforms must take responsibility for safeguarding their audiences against the spread of false information, and this includes stopping their own AI mechanisms from generating it,” Hobbs said in a separate statement, reported by The Washington State Standard’s Jerry Cornfield.
Hobbs and the other states’ election officials, with only a bully pulpit at their disposal, asked Musk to direct Grok subscribers’ election inquiries to CanIVote.org, an effort of the National Association of Secretaries of State that offers information and links regarding each state’s election system, including how to register, voter registration status, voting requirements and more. Washington voters can go directly to Washington’s Secretary of State website at sos.wa.gov.
The other internal threat to confidence in our election systems has increasingly spewed from those who before and after elections have questioned and attacked their integrity with the intent of preparing the ground for, then advancing their excuses for outcomes that don’t favor them. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the claims by Donald Trump and supporters of a “stolen election” before and long after that date, should not be that far removed from our memories. Nor should the conclusion of the Trump administration’s own Homeland Security secretary that the 2020 election “was probably the most transparent and secure in the nation’s history.”
Which leaves voters where, less than 90 days before a general election that will set consequential players and policy at local, state and federal levels for years, if not decades?
It leaves them with homework.
Presented with an information landscape that ranges from trustworthy to biased to deceptive, that homework will require additional effort by voters to question what they see and hear, seek out trusted sources for confirmation and context and challenge their own preconceptions regarding issues and candidates.
That work begins now, each time you turn on the radio or TV, talk with friends and neighbors, or pick up a newspaper or phone.
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