Deepfakes, influencers will change dynamic of next election, experts say

Artificial intelligence and deepfake technology could have significant effects on the next federal election, experts in social media monitoring warned Wednesday.

Testifying before the public inquiry into foreign interference, members of the Media Ecosystem Observatory said they also expect to see a rise in social media influencers and the use of private chat groups and messaging services like WeChat and WhatsApp during the election campaign.

«There is a varying degree of publicness to privateness of those groups, but substantial discourses are happening in them,» said Taylor Owen, founding director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University.

The Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) is a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto that studies the spread of information and disinformation in digital media.

Experts with the MEO warned that artificial intelligence technology, with its ability to create social media accounts and content for those accounts, threatens to have a particularly disruptive effect on elections.

The technology to create «deepfake» audio and video also has evolved since the last election, Aengus Bridgman, an assistant professor from McGill University who directs the MEO, told the inquiry.

With artificial intelligence, someone can take a speech by a politician and manipulate it to make it sound like the politician was saying something entirely different, Bridgman said.

Those who don't follow politics closely could be convinced that a deepfake is real, he said.

«Most people, most of the time, don't care about politics,» added Peter Loewen, a professor at Cornell University on leave from the University of Toronto.

Owen said Canadians' social media feeds are being