In the wake of Elon Musk posting on X (formerly Twitter) a digitally altered “deepfake” video, insidiously manipulating a campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris, Professor Catherine Powell, Eunice Hunton Carter Distinguished Research Scholar at Fordham Law, wrote a post for the Council on Foreign Relations’s Net Politics blog, examining the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes in the 2024 presidential race. This blog post builds on Powell’s earlier post on AI entering the political arena.
Powell is an adjunct senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Beyond the derogatory nature of the video’s content—which includes the use of a generated spoof voice of Harris describing herself as “the ultimate diversity hire”—the video has resurfaced the ever-present debate on whether technology companies can reliably “self-regulate.” In this case, the irony is especially stark as Musk ostensibly violated his own platform’s policy on synthetic and manipulated media by failing to disclose the context of the audio being AI-generated and failing to label it as a parody as was done by the original creator.