--- title: How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation description: As the 2024 race for President heats up, so too does concern over the spread of AI misinformation in elections. Experts weigh in. canonical: https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/ author: Rebecca Schneid article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-09-18T13:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:17.084Z article:section: Politics og:title: How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation og:description: As the 2024 race for President heats up, so too does concern over the spread of AI misinformation in elections. og:url: https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt85d08155ee8b1160/698a5afbd0753332a0e7136e/GettyImages-1587044309.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2305 og:image:height: 1297 og:image:alt: Man with media info noise vector concept og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation twitter:description: As the 2024 race for President heats up, so too does concern over the spread of AI misinformation in elections. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt85d08155ee8b1160/698a5afbd0753332a0e7136e/GettyImages-1587044309.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=eb03eeb7-2499-4d5f-ab98-bad68b48e720&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How AI May Meddle With The Election Year [Watch (HLS stream): How AI May Meddle With The Election Year](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Pe8KJmwX.m3u8) (4:21)  _Published 2024-02-23. The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. Experts on AI explain how it may meddle with the 2024 election._  by [Rebecca Schneid](https://time.com/author/rebecca-schneid/)  ## Rebecca Schneid Reporter Sep 18, 2024 1:00 PM UTC  Man with media info noise concept. Dependence on social networks. Information overloaded young guy. Fake news and propaganda, infomedic. Message and mail. Cartoon flat vector illustration Man with media info noise concept. Dependence on social networks. Information overloaded young guy. Fake news and propaganda, infomedic. Message and mail. Cartoon flat vector illustration Getty Images  by [Rebecca Schneid](https://time.com/author/rebecca-schneid/)  ## Rebecca Schneid Reporter Sep 18, 2024 1:00 PM UTC As the 2024 race for President heats up, so too does concern over the spread of AI misinformation in elections. “It’s an arms race,” says Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). And it’s not a fair race: the use of artificial intelligence to spread misinformation is a struggle in which the “bad guys don't have to open source their data sets or present at conferences or prepare papers,” Parsons says. AI misinformation has already become an issue this year. Pop sensation Taylor Swift [endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris](https://time.com/7020451/taylor-swift-kamala-harris-donald-trump-ai/) after former President Donald Trump posted a fake image of her endorsing him. “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift stated in the Instagram caption of her Harris endorsement. The Swift incident isn’t the first instance of AI misinformation this election cycle. Florida Governor and then Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis [posted a campaign video](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181097435/desantis-campaign-shares-apparent-ai-generated-fake-images-of-trump-and-fauci) in June 2023 including apparently fake images of Trump hugging former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci. Earlier this year, a political consultant utilized [artificial intelligence-generated robocalls mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice](https://apnews.com/article/biden-robocalls-ai-new-hampshire-charges-fines-9e9cc63a71eb9c78b9bb0d1ec2aa6e9c) to voters ahead of New Hampshire’s presidential primary, suggesting that voting in the primary would preclude voters from casting ballots in November. A new study by Parsons and the CAI, published Wednesday, found that a large majority of respondents (94%) are concerned that the spread of misinformation will impact the upcoming election, and 87% of respondents said that the rise of generative AI has made it more challenging to discern fact from fiction online. The data was collected from 2,002 responses from U.S. citizens, all of whom were 18 and older. “I don't think there's anything that 93% of the American public agrees on, but apparently this is one of them, and I think there's a good reason for that,” said Hany Farid, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and advisor to the CAI. “There are people on both sides creating fake content, people denying real content, and suddenly you go online like, ‘What? What do I make of anything?’” A bipartisan group of lawmakers [introduced legislation Tuesday](https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-schiff-fitzpatrick-congress-6ef47dcc0e71470957e29767ed5422b1) that would prohibit political campaigns and outside political groups from using AI to pretend to be politicians. [Multiple state legislatures](https://www.citizen.org/article/tracker-legislation-on-deepfakes-in-elections/) have now also introduced bills regulating deepfakes in elections. Parsons believes now is a “true tipping point” in which “consumers are demanding transparency.” But in the absence of significant laws or effective technological guardrails, there are things you can do to protect yourself from AI misinformation heading into November, researchers say. One key tactic is to not rely on social media for election news. “Getting off social media is step number one, two, three, four, and five; it is not a place to get reliable information,” says Farid. You should view X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook as spaces for fun, not spaces to “become an informed citizen,” he says. Since social media is where many deepfakes and AI misinformation disseminate, informed citizens must fact check their information with sites like Politifact, factcheck.org, and Snopes, or major media outlets, before reposting. “The fact is: more likely than not you're part of the problem, not the solution,” Farid says. “If you want to be an informed citizen, fantastic. But that also means not poisoning the minds of people, and going to serious outlets doing fact checks.” Another strategy is to carefully examine the images you’re seeing spread online. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff and Daniel Schiff, assistant professors of political science at Purdue University, are working on a database tracking politically-relevant deepfakes. They say technology has made it harder than ever for consumers to be proactive and spot the differences between AI-generated content and reality. Still, they have found in their research that many of the popular deepfakes they study are “lower quality” than real photos. “We'll go to conferences and people say, ‘Well, I knew those were fake. I knew that Trump wasn't meeting with Putin.’ But we don't know if this works for everybody,” Daniel Schiff says. “We know that the images that can be created can be super persuasive to coin-flip levels of accuracy detection by the public.” And as the technology advances, that’s only going to become more difficult, and the strategy may “not work in two years or three years,” he says. To help users evaluate what they’re seeing online, the CAI is working to implement “Content Credentials,” which they describe as a “nutrition label” for digital content, carrying verifiable metadata like the date and time the content was created, edited, and signaling whether and how AI may have been used. Still, researchers agree that reestablishing public faith in trusted information will need to be a multifaceted effort—including regulations, technology, and consumer media literacy. Says Farid: “There is no silver bullet.” ## Transcript [00:00] 2024 is going to be the first AI election that we've had in the [00:06] United States and we should expect that there will be attempts [00:11] to use AI to attack our election infrastructure to further [00:15] poison the information environment. [00:25] The 2024 election will be more risky than before because [00:32] of artificial intelligence its own President Polk's are very [00:37] focused on RD pics and you fix could be used to make it look [00:43] like candidates are other officials are staying something [00:46] that they never said. [00:47] We've already had that other countries elections in Slovakia. [00:52] We saw a debate audio used against one of the candidates [00:57] in the weekend before the election. [00:59] And now we have a lot of the power generated by a generator [01:06] internet and social media are filled with AI generated [01:19] content in done because of the way those content is generated by [01:24] AI. [01:25] Call it was have certain biases. [01:27] The biases will manifest in those content in previous elections [01:34] would do see sociopaths. [01:36] We're used to spread misinformation. [01:39] There are concerns that they make it easier for Bad actors [01:45] to fool election workers by imitating a people who work in elections [01:50] in a phone call or in an email and getting election workers [01:54] to provide information that they shouldn't be providing [01:58] voter. Suppression is another area where I think people are worried that [02:01] day. I made may be helpful. [02:03] We have a history in the Uso robocalls being used to confuse [02:09] voters about went about social media being used by false information. [02:14] So maybe that voters don't show up or are scared to vote. [02:18] I am worried that a I may become yet another one. [02:25] That the dangers of AI and then start to believe that AI has [02:31] taken over our elections or maybe rely on a i to give them information. [02:35] I used all of the main commercial chat box and ask them questions [02:40] about the elections in different states to test them and all [02:43] of them provided some wrong information a little bit of a flip [02:47] side. I think it's really important but would say something [02:50] called the wires dividend if you think back to the 2012 election, [02:54] which was Romney vs. Obama [02:57] or the 2016 election, which was Trump versus Hillary [03:01] Clinton in both of those cases. [03:02] There were audios that leaps of one of the major candidates, [03:09] you know, she was down in Palm Beach. [03:15] If something like that comes out in the future that is legitimate. [03:18] It's going to be easier for candidates to deny that a video [03:22] or audio of them is actually real [03:25] It's critical to stop double check yourself and and do research [03:33] to find out whether or not what you're seeing on social media [03:36] is accurate a lot of election officials and other politicians [03:40] on social media have been verified the watermarking [03:45] and requiring some kind of authentication of video audio images [03:52] that appear on social media and long-term Year all of the security [04:02] measures that we talked about that we need to put in place [04:04] to defend our elections. [04:06] We have to double down on them and we have to invest further [04:08] over the course of the next few months to make sure that the [04:11] system is as resilient as possible. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/"},"headline":"How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation","datePublished":"2024-09-18T13:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:50:17.084Z","description":"As the 2024 race for President heats up, so too does concern over the spread of AI misinformation in elections.","url":"https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/","keywords":["TIME Votes","News Desk","Second click"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt85d08155ee8b1160/698a5afbd0753332a0e7136e/GettyImages-1587044309.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Rebecca Schneid","jobTitle":"Reporter","url":"https://time.com/author/rebecca-schneid/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt85d08155ee8b1160/698a5afbd0753332a0e7136e/GettyImages-1587044309.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Man with media info noise vector concept","caption":"Man with media info noise vector concept","creditText":"Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/tag/time-votes/","name":"TIME Votes"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/7022120/ai-election-misinformation-2024/","name":"How to Protect Yourself from AI Election Misinformation"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"How AI May Meddle With The Election Year","description":"The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. 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