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Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve

India’s elections are a glimpse of the AI-driven future of democracy. Politicians are using audio and video deepfakes of themselves to reach voters—who may have no idea they’ve been talking to a clone.

At Polymath Synthetic Media Solutions, self-taught deepfaker Divyendra Singh Jadoun collects video and audio data of local politicians in order to translate their speech into different languages for voter outreach. In the past, that would have meant spending months crisscrossing Rajasthan, a desert state roughly the size of Italy, to speak with voters individually, reminding them of how they have benefited from various BJP social programs—pensions, free tanks for cooking gas, cash payments for pregnant women. Stuck at home, away from politics, he started an experiment: a series of “30-day challenges” where he’d spend a month learning a new skill—playing the flute, mastering graphic design, trading on the stock market, becoming ambidextrous—to see whether that would help him figure out the next phase of his life.

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