AI and municipal elections in Ontario

By Lee Griffi

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence in literally every facet of life is upon us amid warnings of how powerful the technology could become. Now, there are warnings AI has landed in municipal election campaigns.

Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act has no provisions addressing AI-generated content, synthetic media, or deepfakes in campaign advertising.

Carmi Levy is one of Canada’s top tech experts and said there isn’t a sector anywhere immune to the encroachment of AI and we all would have had to have been naïve to think politics would escape its spread.

“The sad reality is we are seeing more and more AI being incorporated into political messaging up to and including the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation and deep fakes. The use if synthetic assets within political advertising and the use of social media for non-legitimate content is designed to sway political opinion.”

He added voters can no longer believe what they see and can’t assume the message in their inboxes or social media feeds are legitimate. Levy said it’s hard to figure out who to trust these days.

“It’s pretty much a buyer beware and voter beware scenario where we literally have to mistrust at first glance what we see and consume until it is proven otherwise.”

Levy admitted it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between something legitimate and something AI generated. He added we need to look for the origins of an asset.

“When you receive a message that is politically motivated and you want to look at who sent it, is it a recently created account? Does it use original assets or were these assets scraped off existing accounts? Who is interacting with this account, is it part of a large network or is it known as a zombie account which doesn’t have a lot of interaction but has a significant amount of content posted recently.”

He said legitimate accounts have a years long footprint and others will post and react on the content whereas fake accounts show none of those signs. Levy added humanity is very difficult to recreate in a human space and with a little bit of investigation it is easy to determine all is not what it seems. He also offered some advice to eager voters.

“Verify before you engage. Make sure you are absolutely certain it is in fact a legitimate account, human, and political candidate before you decide to engage with them. By responding to non-synthetic content you amplify the algorithms of others and make it easier for non-legitimate content to be distributed and find its audience.”

Levy said everyone can be part of the solution by simply changing behaviours, very slightly, in the digital space.

“By verifying first we ensure false content doesn’t find an audience and others are not duped. By reporting content to the platforms they are on we also ensure the algorithm dials them down so they don’t find an audience.”

He added it is better to not respond and instead click in those three dots to report questionable content that tells the social media platform to reduce its priority in the algorithms so it won’t find an audience.

“That is an absolutely critical step toward ensuring we do not give power to the benevolent actors who use misinformation to misinform us. Unfortunately, as the tools become more powerful, accessible and easier to use, they are going to become more widespread and we are going to have our eyes wide open.”

Some municipal candidates are not overly savvy in the ways of IT but Levy said everyone on a ballot needs to keep their eyes wide open for bad actors in the race who will use digital tools against their opponents.

“Make sure you are scanning social media platforms for signs your content is being lifted and misused. In many cases we have seen ghost accounts created by political opponents made to look like the original one but spewing content that increases the likelihood of them being perceived in a negative manner.”

He added candidates need to keep an eye out to make sure they are not being targeted as they run their campaigns and skills needed as candidates build their campaign team.

“Its bad and its going to get worse. I hope voters are smart enough to see through this,” added Levy.