The Huffington Post published an opinion piece urging the Biden campaign to use AI tools to cover the president’s health concerns.
The article, titled, “It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI,” calls for Biden’s reelection team to “consider leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively reach the voting public.”
According to the guest author, Kaivan Shroff, AI “augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments.”
The article adds that “AI would be a cost-effective and efficient way to communicate his message personally and directly to voters.”
According to Shroff, using such technology is ethical due to some media outlets using AI to publish “cheapfakes,” or videos of Biden that make him appear “confused or weak,” Shroff writes.
The “cheapfake” videos described, however, are real videos without augmentation.
For instance, a video showing Biden wandering away during the G7 summit was dubbed “disinformation” by his campaign. “We have to combat that disinformation, we have to hit it hard when it happens and make it clear that these are dirty tactics that MAGA Republicans are using, because they can’t run on the issues,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod said.
Despite some claiming the clip of Biden’s aimless wandering was fake, the extended version of the video still shows the president walking away from the event.
“Until now, it has been almost taken as a given that using AI renderings of the president would violate some ethical baseline of campaigning,” Shroff adds. “In an ideal world that may be so. Yet, what last week’s debate made clear is just how far from any such ideal our current reality is.”
Shroff suggests that at the root of the call for AI is a profound aversion to Donald Trump, declaring that the “greatest moral and ethical imperative for those who care about American democracy” is to keep “man who tried to overthrow it as far away from the White House as possible.”