2023-10-28 17:48:00
The favorite to win the elections in Bogot boasts a dirty deal with researchers and a controversial politician confesses to having bribed deputies. Alleged audio created with artificial intelligence (AI) tarnishes the final stretch of local elections in Colombia.
Generally impossible to verify, the audios circulate on WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok and are used as propaganda or libi to escape a scandal. In the raging river of falsifications, some candidates take the opportunity to discredit accusations against them with the mantra: “It was made with artificial intelligence.”
Colombia, which will hold regional elections this Sunday, follows in the footsteps of countries such as Venezuela, Mexico and the United States, where content created with AI is already beginning to cross the line between reality and digital falsifications.
– “Cheap fakes” –
“Payment and inflation [dos nmeros] The polls worked, the people believed. This will put (Gustavo) Bolvar and I in the second round, according to the plan”, a fake voice is heard saying, very similar to that of the candidate for mayor of Bogot, Carlos Fernando Galn.
Favorite in the polls to go to the second round with the ruling party, Gustavo Bolvar, the centrist candidate denied the audio: “Now with artificial intelligence they are creating my voice to say things I never said. It’s incredible (…), a dirty war “, alleged Galn in a video published on his X account (formerly Twitter), without specifying who was behind the piece.
According to the editor of the specialized portal Muchohacker.lol, Camilo Andrs Garca, “it would not be possible to know exactly whether this is false or not”.
However, the robotic intonation and the pauses in the diction lead Garca to think that it is a “rough” forgery of Galn’s voice created with some digital tool.
For Juan Felipe Rodrigo, author of research on “deepfakes” – videos created with AI that reproduce a person’s exact gestures and tone of voice – “this is a ‘cheap fake’, that is, montages that are clearly fake”.
just a sample of what could happen later with “deepfakes”, as is already happening in the United States, where at the beginning of this year a realistic but fake audio of President Joe Biden and his likely rival in the 2024 elections circulated on TikTok, Donald Trump, hurling insults at each other.
Despite the poor quality, Galn’s supposed audio was presented as real by several TikTok and Twitter users.
“suspicious, but when you hear it you have doubts (…) there must be people or agencies in Colombia that are testing how to do these things”, says Garca, who tried to make a replica of Galn’s voice by presenting samples of his interventions in an AI program that costs a dollar.
– perfect libi –
During the campaign, a dozen politicians plagued by scandals claimed in their defense that they were defamatory campaigns with audio supposedly made with artificial intelligence.
Garca, however, doubts the veracity of many of these statements and claims that it could be a “political marketing” strategy.
The candidate for mayor of Sincelejo (north), Yahir Acua, is heard in an alleged audio report reporting bribes given to politicians in exchange for supporting his candidacy.
“The fact that it sounds like my voice doesn’t hold me responsible. There are apps that simulate people’s voices”, he defended himself on W Radio.
“Artificial intelligence works wonders. I don’t remember having these conversations,” emphasized Acua, a former parliamentarian being investigated for possible links with drug traffickers.
And on Friday, 48 hours before polling stations opened, the outgoing governor of the department of Quindo, Roberto Jaramillo, asked the Public Ministry “to compare, using forensic evidence, an audio transmission on (social) networks in which “artificial intelligence was used to clone” his voice.
The recording in which Jaramillo coordinates campaign activities with one of his successful candidates – an activity prohibited in Colombia – was released by investigative journalist Daniel Coronell, who defends its veracity based on the concept of an expert in artificial intelligence.
However, Garca specifies that “to date there is no application that detects with complete certainty whether a sound was created with AI, as is the case with images.”
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