Key Takeaways
Elon Musk didn’t wait long after Joe Biden stepped aside to make way for Kamala Harris before reinstigating his tirade against Democratic politicians.
Posting a fake campaign video with an AI voiceover attacking Harris on X, Musk provoked the ire of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who threatened to crack down on AI-generated political ads. But Musk didn’t seem to take the threat too seriously.
In the video that sparked the controversy, an AI-generated voice emulating Kamala Harris echoes familiar Republican criticisms of the presumed Democratic nominee.
Referring to Harris as “the ultimate diversity hire” and a “deep state puppet” the post is hardly original. But according to some critics, it could be dangerous.
Calling Musk out on X Newsom stated that “manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal. I’ll be signing a bill in a matter of weeks to make sure it is.”
Firing back at the threat, Musk said: “I checked with renowned world authority, Professor Suggon Deeznutz, and he said parody is legal in America.”
The controversy over Musk’s post centers on an important distinction: where the line between satire and disinformation is.
While X’s manipulated media policy prohibits AI deepfakes intended to confuse or decieve, it provides an explicit exemption for memes or satire, “provided these do not cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.”
Of course, appropriate labeling of AI-generated content would avoid the problem of distinguishing what is and isn’t parody. However, X’s approach to deepfake labeling remains significantly less expansive than the one pursued by its social media rival Meta.
Whereas Meta is building systems that automatically tag all AI-generated video, audio, and images as such, X has fallen behind on this front.
https://twitter.com/the_transit_guy/status/1816975547366334630
In part, the platform’s Community Notes system was designed to flag obviously deceptive posts.
But plenty of manipulated media falls through the net. This includes Musk’s latest post, which isn’t labeled as being generated by AI and, unlike the one shared by the original creato r of the video, doesn’t explicitly identify it as a parody.
In the end, most viewers would presumably identify the fake campaign ad as satirical. But Newsom’s intervention stems from a concern that some might not.
Without the right context, social media misunderstandings and distorted meanings are rife. As an MIT report on the intersection of deepfakes and satire recently observed, “online, not everyone is in on the joke”.