A.I.'S AVATARS AIMS : VOTERS INDIAN ESSAY

AROUND the world, elections have become a testing ground for the A.I. boom. The tools have been used to turn an Argentine presidential candidate into Indiana Jones and a Ghostbuster.

During the New Hampshire primary, voters received robocall messages urging them not to vote, in a voice that was most '' likely artificially generated to sound like President Biden's.

And in India, Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party or B.J.P. and the opposition Indian National Congress party have accused each other of spreading election related deepfake content online.

One outpost in this new Indian frontier is in the western desert state of  Rajasthan.

On the ground floor of a residential building on a dusty back lane, a 36-year-old college dropout, Divyendra Singh Jadoun, operates an A.I. start-up, the Indian Deepfaker.

A.I. avatars help Indian candidates reach voters. But some experts are warning of abuse in a nation that is rife with disinformation.

For a glimpse of where artificial intelligence is headed in election campaigns, look to India, the world's largest democracy, which began heading to the polls on Friday.

An A.I.generated version of  Prime Minister Narendra Modi that has been shared on WhatsApp shows the possibilities for hyper personalised outreach in a country with nearly a billion voters.

In the video a demo clip whose source is unclear - Mr.Modi's avatar addresses a series of voters of directly, by name. However, it is not perfect.. Mr. Modi appears to wear two different pairs of glasses, and some parts of the video are pixelated.

Down the ladder, workers in Mr. Modi's party are sending videos by WhatsApp in which their own A.I. avatars deliver personal messages to specific voters about the government benefits they have received and ask for their vote.

Those video messages can be automatically generated in whichever of India's dozen of languages the voter speaks. So can phone messages by A.I. powered chatbots that call constituents in the voices of political leaders and seek their support.

Such outreach requires a fraction of the time and money spent on traditional campaigning, and it has the potential to become an essential instrument in elections. But as the technology races onto the political scene, there are few guardrails to prevent misuse.

Chatbots and personalized videos may seem more or less harmless. Experts worry, however, that voters will have an increasingly difficult time distinguishing between real and synthetic messages as the technology advances and spreads.

'' It'll be the Wild West and the unregulated A.I. space this year,'' said Pratek Waghre, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group based in New Delhi.

The technology, he added, is entering a media landscape already polluted with misinformation.

This Master Essay Publishing continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks Suhasini Raj.