Joseph Sabino Mistick: We have all the information we need for November

In January, along with former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, I joined a few dozen state advisory board members of Keep Our Republic at a two-day conference near Washington, D.C. Keep Our Republic is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that is working to identify problems that could come up in our presidential election, and it is using public education to restore trust in our system.

There were information sessions on the Electoral Count Reform Act and Certificates of Ascertainment and other potential legal pitfalls. How to meet tight constitutional deadlines in the event of natural or man-made disasters also got a lot of attention. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, it has become necessary to think through all of these things, if we are going to preserve our democratic institutions.

One of the sessions opened with a video of a very serious President Joe Biden, seated behind his desk in the White House, announcing that he had just signed an order postponing the upcoming election. It was an announcement that would throw the election and the future of the Republic into uncertainty and create chaos.

But sure enough, there was Joe Biden. His face, his gestures, his voice were all spot on. He had a serious demeanor as such an announcement would require. It was really him. But it was not really him at all, just a deepfake, an artificial intelligence version of the president. Whoever created this fake could have had him say anything they wanted him to say.

The room fell silent. Many of the people there have met with Biden, worked for or against him, and know him well. All of us have seen him countless times on live broadcasts and video. And every one of us would have been fooled if we had not known that this was an exercise to show us how easily we could be fooled.

An April article by Mark Scott in Politico described how British researcher Callum Hood could undermine any election using OpenAI and a few artificial intelligence devices to sow doubt. “Within seconds of him typing in a few prompts — ‘create a realistic photo of voter ballots in a dumpster’; ‘a photo of long lines of voters waiting outside a polling station in the rain’; ‘a photo of Joe Biden sick in the hospital’ — the AI models spat out reams of realistic images,” Scott wrote.

Deepfakes have been used recently to try to manipulate elections and national politics in Northern Ireland, Slovakia, Moldova, Poland and Ukraine. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unsuccessfully used a deepfake against Donald Trump. In New Hampshire, a deepfake robocall had Biden telling people not to vote in the Democratic primary.

With all of the fake information that can flood the mainstream media and social media in the upcoming election, voters will have to work hard this time. Skepticism is the best defense. Until there are laws strong enough to deter artificial intelligence manipulations of free elections, we can ignore social media and all the deepfakes and not be the worse for it.

We are fully qualified to make this judgment. We know these guys. We know Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We know their character and values. We know how they both have performed as president. We know who their friends are and who they look to for advice. We just have to vote.