Reportage
What A.I. can do is not a tough question anymore. A.I. and discussions about its capabilities have become household around the world. In the latest example of A.I.'s competence, the former ruling party of Pakistan released a speech of their leader, Imran Khan, who is currently behind bars and not allowed to address the public.
Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf or P.T.I., was effectively barred from participating in the February 8 election. But their candidates managed to run in the election independently, and they won the most seats. However, they are unable to form a government as their candidacy was officially independent, and to form a government in Pakistan, winners have to be under one umbrella.
After they had secured the most number of seats contesting against another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif's party, Khan's party released a speech on social media in which he congratulated his men and thanked them for turning out to vote.
Well, the voice talking in the speech was not of Khan himself, but it was an A.I. simulation of his voice. It's a process by which anyone can feed an A.I. model with a certain voice, aiming to make it sound exactly like that.
In politics, it always holds a great importance for politicians to connect with their supporters. But it becomes impossible when they face repression or maybe jail terms like Khan. To circumvent this situation, A.I. can be a great help. With the rise of A.I. language models and the sophistication of A.I. voice synthesis, cloning someone's voice became as easy as typing a few letters on a keyboard.
Before the A.I. voice of Khan, which took the social media sphere by storm, Khan wrote an article in a British newspaper, which was also created with the help of A.I., clearly shedding light on a future where politicians may employ A.I. more- tailoring speech for a diverse audience, delivering it in multiple languages regardless of their physical presence.
Well, there is no chance of denying the other side of A.I.'s impact. With the help of this technology, what Bill Gates put as- AI is like nuclear energy-both promising and dangerous-, anyone can clone anyone's voice.
Over the last year, newspapers have been inundated with the news of deepfakes- a form of content generated by A.I. to defame individuals or institutions, meaning that A.I. can also be used to create (maybe generated is the right word here) convincing contents- be it speech or images or maybe videos- to defame political opponents, or sow discord among the public.
And it will surely spread disinformation and erase authenticity and trust. And we know how much effort the social media companies need to put in to fight against disinformation following the recent rise of A.I. thanks to OpenAI's generative A.I. product ChatGPT and Google's Bard (Bard is recently rebranded as Gemini).
The weaponization of AI can be fought only by developing safeguards, educating the public, and preserving human connection more than ever. The countries in the West are sweating over standardized A.I. policies. A global policy is essential to fight the challenges posed by technology, which has the potential to upend the life that we live today.
Khan's A.I. speech came as a glimpse of the future of how politicians may employ this technology for their political gain. But A.I. has a double-edged nature that politicians can use in speech. So, the world should take guard in this regard, collaborating with technology experts, policymakers, and civil society's representation to mitigate the harm that A.I. poses.
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