Following Pres. Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 US Presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the front-runner to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Only 24 hours after Biden announced his decision to drop out, a deepfake video of the Harris speaking incoherently has gone viral.

Using AI-altered video and audio to attack political opponents is nothing new in an already ugly 2024 election season. What’s particularly interesting about this instance is how quickly it happened. In less than a day, actors seeking to smear Harris were able to put together a convincing enough deepfake, and were able to get the clip to go viral on social media. This turnaround time for creating and spreading AI-powered misinformation is new in mainstream politics, a clear indication that actors looking to spread this type of misinformation understand the technology and processes involved very well.

At time of writing, we don’t yet know who created the AI-altered content of the Vice President. Given the history of right-wing attacks targeting Harris, this latest AI-powered attack was likely politically motivated.

Will AI-altered content used to attack political opponents become the norm? We’ll see. A handful of states have attempted to pass legislation to regulate the use of generative AI in political campaign materials, but this likely won’t be sufficient (you can read a piece I wrote about state level AI legislation here). Much of the AI-powered misinformation we’ve seen so far isn’t published by campaigns, but is instead posted and shared on social media. Regulation in that area could help, but attempting to regulate the likes of Meta and Google is a completely different, yet no less difficult battle.

MediaMatters already has some excellent reporting out on AI-altered content being used to attack Kamala Harris, which you can check out here. I’d also recommend checking out some of their other publications on the new wave of political attacks targeting Harris – they add great context to this conversation.