FAKE A.I. VIDEOS FLOODING BRAZIL ELECTIONS

Videos made with artificial intelligence, ranging from the amusing and absurd to the grim and deceitful, have flooded the Brazilian internet ahead of a high-stakes presidential election on Sunday.

This has turned Latin America’s largest democracy into a real-time laboratory for the electoral use of A.I., offering parallels to the United States, where critical midterm elections approach, and to other nations grappling with the effect of powerful new technologies on political life.

But in Brazil, a chronically online nation of 214 million where disinformation has defined elections for nearly a decade, the deluge of A.I. — made by candidates, strategists and ordinary citizens — has become a stark gauge of the nation’s capacity to police online content.

Online disinformation is already a hallmark of Brazil’s electoral season, but A.I.’s prevalence and advancing sophistication are posing a major new challenge for the Brazilian authorities working to protect the integrity of the country’s vote.

Brazil, which has some of the world’s strictest regulations against electoral falsehoods, has issued equally stringent rules on A.I. use during elections. But these guardrails have remained largely untested until now.

“We made the rules, now we’re watching to see what happens,” said Kássio Nunes Marques, chief justice of Brazil’s electoral court, which oversees the vote.

The Brazilian election is pitting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, against Flávio Bolsonaro, a right-wing challenger, in a tight contest for the presidency. It is also the biggest test in the region for an ascendant right, which has won seven straight presidential votes in the past 18 months.

In the race to sway a deeply divided Brazilian public, social media has become a key political battleground. And in Brazil, like elsewhere around the world, A.I. has emerged as a potent tool for spreading political messages and shaping the online conversation.

Brazil’s electoral court bars candidates from using “deepfakes,” synthetic but realistic videos or audio messages, while campaigning. It also requires campaigns to clearly label videos generated by A.I.

“When a voter hears a candidate who has been enhanced through artificial intelligence, are they truly hearing the candidate?” said Justice Nunes Marques. “Something that might appear harmless could, in fact, cause harm to the electoral process.”

Tech companies, including Meta, Google and OpenAI, complying with a court request, provided detailed plans about how they would handle A.I. produced and shared on their platforms.

And, ahead of the elections, the electoral authorities banned companies from allowing chatbots from ranking or recommending politicians, though independent watchdogs have found that some platforms have broken that rule.

The country’s broader social media regulations also require digital platforms to swiftly remove posts by regular users who spread electoral lies, attack democratic institutions or otherwise break Brazilian laws.

But the rules haven’t been fine-tuned to distinguish A.I.-generated content meant to mislead from A.I. used for creative expression, according to André Giacchetta, a lawyer who represents social media platforms in Brazil.

“The regulation,” said Mr. Giacchetta, “doesn’t set a threshold for when exactly the use of A.I. begins to constitute potential interference in the electoral process.” This, critics argue, can lead to the overzealous policing of A.I.-generated content that may limit freedom of speech.

- Author: Ana Ionova, The New York Times

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