Real or Not Real? The Danger of AI-Generated Content in Elections

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Now, Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, is worried about the spike in A.I. generated campaign content, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to share how he’s prepping others to combat this challenge. And just a note here, this conversation includes clips from actual deepfake videos, right? They’re fake, but they are watermarked to try and prevent them from being used further in a misleading way. And this is at a time, of course, when there is so much information to parse. And of course, so many critical choices. Our goal here is to help you separate fact from fiction.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Paula, thanks. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, thanks so much for joining us. You are in charge of elections in a crucial state, Arizonand you’ve done something pretty radical on the last few weeks, which is to help people understand that there is going to be a flood of misinformation and disinformation around the election. Why did you do this?

ADRIAN FONTES, ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, first, thanks for having me. And second, we’ve got to be prepared. You know, protecting democracy is a critical component now of what we should do as election administrators across the United States of America and we are seeing similar preparations in a variety of different areas, not just in personnel security, information, technology, security for our software systems and our networking systems. And we’re doing it in other ways here in Arizona as well, the proliferation of artificial intelligence, particularly degenerative artificial intelligence is something that a lot of people haven’t seen yet. And so, just to make sure that the folks who run the fundamentals of our democracy are prepared, we’re doing everything we can to help them.

SREENIVASAN: Now, you have a military background and you ran something called Tabletop Exercises with different groups of people. Explain kind of what you tried to do.

FONTES: So, this is pretty typical in law enforcement and military spaces where you will sit around a table and just imagine a game of “Dungeons and Dragons,” but the scenarios are real. And imagine walking through an election day where you have news reports coming at you, you have different sorts of folks talking about different things that end up happening, that is what we do in our Tabletop Exercises. We inject into a regular day’s conversation some of the scenarios that folks might face so that they’ll be prepared when it actually does end up happening. How do you talk to your communications folks? How do you talk to your supply chain folks? How do you talk to your law enforcement folks? And this coordination happens in a pretty rapid-fire space because when you’re running elections, you’ve only got one day. And the calendar doesn’t stop. You don’t get any extension, so you’ve got to do it right the first time. Practice makes perfect. And while no election is perfect, we’re hoping we can get pretty close.

SREENIVASAN: So, you’re trying to do this to prepare people on your team, law enforcement, the media, so that if this happens on election day, they’re not surprised by it and they’ve maybe gone through the motions before?

FONTES: And that’s exactly right. And that’s exactly why we’re using a deepfakes created by artificial intelligence of myself and other elections officials. We started back in December training elections officials. We’ve continued with a media training, a media Tabletop Exercise for our partners in local and national media. And this month in June, we’re doing law enforcement agencies so that they can at least see what’s going on. If there’s anything I learned in the Marine Corps is that you want to train with an awareness of the weapons that your enemies might use against you so that it’s not new, so that you’re not excited by it when it happens.

SREENIVASAN: I want to prepare our audience here. What they’re about to see is a clip. Not of you. Obviously, we are speaking to the real human being you. You’re probably sitting at the same desk here, but let’s play a clip of this video. It feels amazingly real and that’s kind of why I want to prepare the audience.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AI RENDERING OF ADRIAN FONTES’ VOICE: This is an impersonation of Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes using generative A.I. The video was created as part of the Arizona election security and A.I. Tabletop Exercise for the media. Our goal is to make sure folks understand the capabilities of current deepfake technology and the dangers it poses to the public.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SREENIVASAN: I mean, how easy was that to make?

FONTES: Well, the process consisted of the following. I looked into the camera here at my desk. As you can see, it’s a very similar background, just a little different angle. I read off of the screen for about 30 seconds. And then, I had a conversation with the technologist for four minutes while the generation of that deepfake happened. And they had programmed in the text that the deepfake was supposed to say, and bam, it happened.

SREENIVASAN: I want to just put a fine point on it. None of the words that were in that video ever came out of your mouth. It’s not like the recording just remixed things that you’d already said. This is something that you had physically not said but you had a computer say, pretending to be you in your voice. Is that right?

FONTES: That’s correct. The technology actually learns my voice. It learns my mannerisms. It learns my — the way that I look, it learns the environment behind me and what I’m wearing, and then you can make it do whatever you want. You could have changed my jacket color to green instead of blue. You could change my language, and the way that my mouth moves would actually match that language. We’ve done some deepfakes in other languages than English as well, and they’re pretty convincing.

SREENIVASAN: You know what, I want to show the audience a clip of you speaking German. Now, I took some high school German and this is way beyond what I understand. Let’s take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AI RENDERING OF ADRIAN FONTES’ VOICE: Let’s try talking in German. For a malicious adversary, neither you nor your target need to be able to speak a language to general content for it. Consider the best and worst ways this technology can be used. It allows an individual to communicate with an audience in their native language using your voice. However, a malicious actor could use your likeness and benefit from the trust that people place in you to trick them and spread dangerous lies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: OK. So, game this out for me. Here I am near election day, I have a video that shows up on my Facebook page or some other social platform, it is the secretary of state of Arizona speaking in whatever language I’m comfortable with, saying, you know what, the polls are suddenly closed at 2:00. What — How do I process this information knowing that it could be you, but it could not be you?

FONTES: Well, look, the bottom line is this, there are trusted sources of information that people can depend on, mostly those are, in the United States, the secretary of state’s offices, your local election administrator, either at the county or the municipal level. And the rules are set pretty much solidly way ahead of time, and it’s a very, very rare emergency. It almost never happens where polls get closed unless there is, again, an emergency of some sort. And usually that’s defined with very narrow geographic location, sometimes one or two polling places during a flood or a hurricane or something like that. So, if there is something that invokes an emotion in you like, holy mackerel, that’s crazy. That’s weird. That’s strange. What we’re asking folks to do is go to those trusted sources of information and find out if what you just saw is just something that was created to evoke that emotion in you because it seems so unusual. And this is one of the parts of — one of the ways that we’re trying to get folks to understAnd be better consumers of information, even if it seems like it’s coming from some of those trusted sources.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the video samples that got a lot of attention in Arizona, I want to play this here, this is a Kari Lake, a Republican running for the Senate in Arizona. Let’s take a look at this video.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AI RENDERING OF KARI LAKE’S VOICE: Hi. I’m Kari Lake. Subscribe to the Arizona Agenda for hard hitting, real news, and a preview of the terrifying artificial intelligence coming your way in the next election. Like this video, which is an A.I. deepfake the Arizona Agenda made to show you just how good this technology is getting. Did you realize this video is fake? Well, in the next six months, this technology will get a lot better. By the time the November election rolls around, you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference between reality and artificial intelligence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: This Kari Lake video that you just saw was not created by her campaign. They sent out a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of that video. At this point, you know, I see people scratching their heads saying, wait a minute, like that look like as good a campaign ad, the same quality, you know, all I’m missing at the very end is, I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message or I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message, right? And even that you could fake. So, what is my sort of stamp that this is actually anything that I see on video coming into a political cycle like this is real?

FONTES: Well, it’s interesting that you say stamp, because there are some major technology companies that are working directly with my office and I believe other secretaries of state to figure out a method by which we can, I’ll just say watermark for lack of a better word, some of the authentic messages that are coming from our offices. Look, if you’re trying to figure out — particularly the information, not so much about candidates but a lot of states are making laws about that. But if you want to look at the time, place, and manner, sort of the regulations of how elections are supposed to happen, go to the dot gov websites. It’s real hard to pirate one of those or to fake one of those. The dot gov websites are usually pretty well trusted. The other thing I think that people can do is make sure that you’re getting informed now about candidates, how they feel about certain issues, what they think about certain positions, and start making up your mind early, because what we do know is that early voting is really available in a lot of places across the United States of America. So, that option is available, you know, to avoid the last second emergency issues. We’re telling people to think about that as an option.

SREENIVASAN: I mean, it’s a bit of civics lessons, perhaps for people, but your budget to conduct this free and fair election in Arizona, I mean, that is not coming from the federal government, right?

FONTES: That’s true. And it’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. And I can tell you, I have been up and down Capitol Hill trying to get folks to understand, elections were declared an American critical infrastructure in January of 2017. There is still no sustained federal funding for elections administration in the United States of America. Just like airports or dams or bridges, this keeps America moving, right? Election administration is critical to the nation, to the republic. We’ve got to fund it from the federal level, for federal offices and federal elections under federal rules. The states have their own issues across the country. Many of them are underfunding a lot of these election offices because folks just kind of assume, well, it happens once every couple of years. We plan for elections two years ahead of time. We’ve got to get all of our stuff ready. There’s a lot of maintenance and operations that go on behind the scenes. And so, we really are in a space right now where we have to advocate more forcefully, not just for our budgets, but for the safety of our folks and to make sure they maintain that professional training and upkeep that they need as folks who are going to continue to protect our democracy.

SREENIVASAN: Now, I’ve heard that you have a threat analyst that works for you in your office. Is that right?

FONTES: Yes, we do. We’ve got a chief information security officer here who oversees our Security Department. It’s four people deep. And one of those folks is a threat analyst. This is a person who unfortunately spends a lot of time in the deep, dark corners of the internet, watching the conversations that are happening, paying attention to potential threats that may arise. And then, when appropriate, communicating those to law enforcement for appropriate investigation or any other sort of action that they may decide to do. We’re not a law enforcement agency, but we believe that keeping our folks well-informed and safe is going to maintain — is going to stay a priority for my administration. So, we’ve got more than our share of threats in this office, not only to myself, but my staff. And so, we’re going to be vigilant.

SREENIVASAN: So, tell me a little bit about that. I mean, what is the threat atmosphere like? I mean, I remember the scenes at the polls, especially election watchers that were at times kind of encroaching on the work of people that were actually trying to count the ballots. I mean, what has been — what’s it been like to be part of or to run the elections in Arizona over these past couple of years?

FONTES: Well, it certainly has been a challenge, particularly since there’s a group of people in the United States who have decided that they don’t like democracy, that they don’t want to trust their fellow citizens, and they just don’t want elections to actually happen. They want to have undue and violent influence on regular citizens who are just doing their jobs. So, what we’ve had to do is really step up in a space that we, generally speaking, were not experienced in. Now, my military background aside, we’ve partnered with local and federal law enforcement and state agencies to make sure that we’re providing the best possible coverage for our folks. We’re doing whatever training may be necessary. Some of it might be a little bit scary. But at the end of the day, we want our people to be safe. We want our employees to be safe. Mostly, we want our voters to feel safe when they vote, whether it’s at home, in our ballot by mail system, which is very robust, or if they want to come into one of the vote centers across Arizona. It’s not been an easy task, but it is an important task. And again, we’re going to do whatever we can to maintain our free and fair elections in Arizona, which we have done, not just here in Arizona, but across the United States of America for a long, long time.

SREENIVASAN: Have you or members of your office been threatened with personal harm?

FONTES: I have and others have. And what we do is react appropriately. Not a lot of details I’m willing to share. But at the end of the day, we trust our law enforcement partners to advise us well. And we are seeing an increase in investigations and prosecutions from the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly if and when threats come from outside of our state lines. This cooperation, we’re very grateful for. But it’s too bad that it has to happen. It’s too bad that there are people out there who are, you know, operating in the world of grievance only and think that intimidation and threats is the way that civilized society ought to run. It’s not. And so, we’re going to protect against it, we’re going to defend against it, and we’re going to do everything we can to continue to provide good elections and solid believable outcomes for our voters.

SREENIVASAN: As we’re having this conversation right now, you’ve got a case pending in your state with Rudy Giuliani and 18 others who’ve been indicted on charges related to spreading false information about voter fraud in the 2020 election. And I wonder, do you see any correlation, connection, link between what happened then and the ecosystem that we’re in now, where people have basically alternate facts and alternate realities of what’s happening and might not trust the results of the election in your very state?

FONTES: There’s absolutely a correlation. I mean, this is an extension of the same big lie that has polluted the American political system for a long time. But this is not a political issue. And I don’t think anybody should be fooled by this is a D versus an R thing. This is a democracy versus non-democracy thing. This is Americans trusting one another and moving forward with the peaceful transfer of power versus some people who just don’t care what your vote was, whether you won or whether you lost. These are folks who want to overturn or get rid of American elections as a foundational value that they have. Now, I can’t speak directly to the criminal indictment that belongs to the attorney general. And the folks on the grand jury, they decided there was enough to — evidence to indict, and so be it. But this is an extension of the same big lie. And unfortunately, we still have people in public office who have the temerity to continue to deny that their fellow citizens are just doing their jobs well, in spite of the fact that they have zero evidence to show any of those claims to be true. So, I think folks ought to just stop lying and get on with the program, and the program is this, if you win, you won. If you lose, try harder next time. That’s just how American elections are supposed to work.

SREENIVASAN: Right now, we have a candidate in Former President Trump who essentially says if he does not win, that the system is rigged against him, that the election is already rigged. And, you know, when you have an enormous number of Republicans in Arizona who have this concern, oh, you know what, Fontes, he’s already in the tank. I mean, this is already going to go one way. I’m not going to believe the results if I don’t like the outcome. I mean, how do you deal with that large segment of your population?

FONTES: Well, I’d refer them back to 2020. You know, I was on the ballot with Donald Trump in 2020 when I ran for re-election as Maricopa County Recorder. And I lost, just like he did. And I believed the voters. I believed in the American citizens who ran our elections. Because I saw it from the inside. I was there, you know, as we performed those post-election audits. I saw the reality of the circumstance and I was willing to concede because the peaceful transfer of power in this country, from one elected official to the other, is a hallmark of what it means to be an American. And all of the court cases have shown zero evidence. All of the — you know, the accusations have been proven to be false. And so, this isn’t — again, this is not a political thing. This is not a left versus right thing. This is a truth and reality versus the grievance of some people thing. And I’m not going to back down just because somebody is going to scream politics. They’re wrong if that’s what they’re saying because, you know, my track record proves that they’re wrong.

SREENIVASAN: Adrian Fontes, Arizona Secretary of State, thanks so much for joining us.

FONTES: Thanks for having me.