Time to reign in the AI-based manipulation

We do not have enough time, but we still need to make headway and establish a bridgehead to combat disinformation.

Lim Jong-in The author is a chair professor at the Graduate School of Information Security at Korea University and special advisor to the president for cybersecurity.

Democracy is at war. Elections are supposed to be a blooming flower, a celebration of democracy, but they have become a battleground for disinformation and foreign spies. Now, almost every two or three years, we have to fight a war, instead of holding an election.

Many recent elections around the world have shown signs of democratic regression and cracks in everyday democracy. If that is left unchecked, we will lose our trust in democratic institutions, a government, and one another.

We must now prepare for another war to defend democracy against the spread of disinformation and foreign interference in our elections.

This year, with 76 countries around the world, including the United States, holding elections, democracy will once again be under threat with the dissemination of false information through deepfake videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and generative engines such as ChatGPT. The World Economic Forum has identified election interference via AI-enabled disinformation as a big risk over the next two years. In fact, we have already witnessed numerous cases around the world, in which deepfake videos, indistinguishable from reality, have influenced elections.

As a growing number of countries use AI technology to interfere in the elections of other nations for political gain, it is not unreasonable to expect North Korea to use fake information and deepfake videos to interfere in the upcoming parliamentary elections in the South. A research report from Oxford University shows that North Korea is already engaged in election interference activities through the spread of disinformation, and U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that the North has the capability to have a catastrophic impact on elections. We cannot easily assume victory on this battlefield where AI-generated disinformation and deepfake videos are being mass-produced by malicious forces on social media.

It is promising that big tech companies such as Naver, Google and Microsoft have recently taken voluntary regulatory measures to combat disinformation ahead of the elections. However, their actions, alone, are not enough to mitigate the impact of automated attacks. Our responses remain fragmented, and they are still insufficient to motivate tech companies to live up to their responsibilities.

With less than two months left before the April 10 general election, we need to reinforce our society’s ability to counter disinformation and the spread of deepfake videos. To effectively counter disinformation, collaboration based on public-private partnerships with sufficient authority and technical capacity is a must. The government must establish collaborative arrangements with companies to detect and remove deepfake videos and misleading information, block manipulative accounts and lead, coordinate and control such efforts. Examples include the French government’s close cooperation with Big Tech companies like Meta during its presidential election and the Biden administration’s collaboration with social media companies during the U.S. midterm elections.

To that end, the first step is to establish and operate a task force of relevant ministries, Big Tech companies and experts during the election period to come up with the best-possible countermeasures to prevent the use of deepfake videos and other false information created by AI. The task force should be created as soon as possible under the Korea Communications Commission, which last month was assigned prepare countermeasures against false and manipulative information. Through this task force, the commission must play an active role in creating an environment for self-regulatory activities in the Big Tech sector while utilizing appropriate administrative regulatory tools as well.

We do not have enough time, but we still need to make headway and establish a bridgehead to combat disinformation. Only then will we be able to win the next big battle in three years — Korea’s presidential election — against forces that seek to destroy our democracy.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.