Artificial Democracy: The use of AI needs to be eliminated from politics as new voters experience misinformation during presidential elections

Jilly Jane is an 18-year-old girl who, prior to this November, hasn’t even dipped her toe into the pool of politics. But this year she’s voting in her first presidential election.

Scrolling through Instagram posts, she sees a poster of her favorite musician, Bobby Bill, profusely supporting one of the presidential candidates and posted by that candidate. The poster is an outrageous depiction of Bill wearing glitzy overalls with a pair of wings shouting that he supports the candidate.

It’s enough to sway Jane’s decision to vote for the supported presidential candidate. But, Bobby Bill never really endorsed the presidential candidate — the endorsement was made by artificial intelligence.

Jane isn’t alone in falling for the fake poster, as millions of other voters encounter political AI across social media.

As the 2024 Presidential Election approaches, the use of AI needs to be eliminated from politics to avoid voters experiencing misinformation through extreme counterfeit images.

On Aug. 19, presidential candidate Donald Trump reposted several AI generated images on X of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign. He depicted Swift dressed as Uncle Sam and displayed in front of an American flag, with the text “Taylor Wants You to Vote for Donald Trump.” 

Three more pictures were included of fake fans wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. Trump captioned these photos “I accept!” 

Swift declared to her followers on Instagram that she’ll be voting for Kamala Harris and supporting the democratic party on Sept. 10. She addressed the AI art in her post stating “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of misinformation.”

Politicians are blatantly spreading false information through AI-generated campaigns on social media about celebrities’ opinion on the election. 

Many voters, especially teenagers, can fall victim to the trap of AI imaging, as they don’t know what is and isn’t trustworthy. Social media platforms like X and Instagram are a main source of news for Generation Z and Millennials.

Nearly 46% of Gen Z use social media as their main source of information, according to Forbes, and 35% of Millennials follow this pattern, favoring social media over traditional search engines like Google.

If we can’t trust presidential candidates to be truthful on social media, we certainly can’t trust their other opinions and arguments regarding the election.

If a second-grader were to lie to their parent about eating their vegetables, their parent would likely tell them that the second-grader has broken the “wall of trust” between the two sides. The same rule should apply to politicians.

Yet, the little AI “mess up” like the pro-Trump Swiftie t-shirts will get swept under the rug and deleted as the news grows old. American citizens will forget about the broken “wall of trust” and hang on to every single word once again.

AI social media posts don’t end at Trump. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has reposted depictions of vice president and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Musk posted Kamala Harris in a communist uniform along with the caption “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one” on Sept. 2.

Musk’s post takes attacking a specific politician to a new level — creating completely fabricated negative images of them.

Additionally, images of Trump riding a lion with light shining flawlessly onto him and another of him playing a guitar at rallies have plagued his social media platform: Truth Social. Politicians such as Trump use AI to create ideal images that prove to be an unreliable example for high school students. 

A high school student can’t justify producing original work on an English essay when the potential president of the United States can cheat in his presidential campaign. The spread of misinformation during the election promotes an idea of fallacy that’s “acceptable.”

AI is only bound to improve and grow more realistic. In two years, gone will be the days of six-fingered-hands and crooked faces. AI’s imperfections will be negligible. Nothing’s stopping AI from making a 45-minute long video of Taylor Swift delivering a speech from a mountaintop about a politician’s ideals to an audience of millions by the next election cycle. 

Let’s stop the spread of AI in politics and save the credibility of elections to come for new voters.