Dead Politicians Hit The Campaign Trail For India’s Billion-Voter Election
The 2024 elections in India are widely regarded as the largest in history, with nearly a billion people eligible to cast a vote. Alongside the sheer human scale, there’s another aspect of the Indian elections that is surprising for its magnitude. This is the use of millions of deepfakes by Indian politicians in an attempt to sway voters, a topic on the most recent Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast. As Mike noted during the discussions there, it’s a relatively benign kind of deepfake compared to some of the more nefarious uses that seek to deceive and trick people. But an article on the Rest of the World site points out that the use of deepfakes by Indian politicians is pushing ethical boundaries in other ways:
In January this year, M. Karunanidhi, the patriarch of politics in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, first appeared in an AI video at a conference for his party’s youth wing. In the clip, he wore the look for which he is best remembered: a luminous yellow scarf and oversized dark glasses. Even his head was tilted, just slightly to one side, to replicate a familiar stance from real life. Two days later, he made another appearance at the book launch of a colleague’s memoirs.
Karunanidhi died in 2018.
“The idea is to enthuse party cadres,” Salem Dharanidharan, a spokesperson for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) — the party that Karunanidhi led till his death — told me. “It excites older voters among whom Kalaignar [“Man of Letters,” as Karunanidhi was popularly called] already has a following. It spreads his ideals among younger voters who have not seen enough of him. And it also has an entertainment factor — to recreate a popular leader who is dead.”
A Wired article on the topic of political deepfakes, discussed on the Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast, mentions another Tamil Nadu politician who was resurrected using AI technology:
In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a company called IndiaSpeaks Research Lab contacted voters with calls from dead politician J. Jayalalithaa, endorsing a candidate, and deployed 250,000 personalized AI calls in the voice of a former chief minister. (They had permission from Jayalalithaa’s party, but not from her family.)
That raises the issue of who is able to approve the use of audio and video deepfakes of dead people. In India, it seems that some political parties have no qualms about deploying the technology, regardless of what the politician’s family might think. Should the dead have rights here, perhaps laid down in their wills? If not, who should be in control of their post-death activities? As more political parties turn to deepfakes of the dead for campaigning and other purposes, these are questions that will be asked more often, and which need to be answered.