Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, recently shared a video on his social media platform X that includes a mimicking of Vice President Kamala Harris’ voice.
The video shows Harris saying things she actually didn’t say.
If that weren’t an issue all on its own, the fact that Musk shared it on his social media account — without explicitly saying it was a parody video — has raised even more eyebrows.
The visual elements in the video are the same ones that a legitimate ad that Harris’s campaign released last week as she launched her campaign for president. However, the parody video swaps out the voice over for another voice that impersonates the vice president quite convincingly.
In the video, the voice can be heard saying:
“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate.”
The video further says Harris is only a “diversity hire” because she’s a person of color and a woman, and that she doesn’t know “the first thing about running the country.”
In addition to the mock voice over, the video has the same “Harris for President” branding that the real campaign ad does. The mock video also has some real video clips of Harris in it.
Videos like these are what many critics of artificial intelligence have publicly worried about for the past year. It’s very hard to discern if something like this is real or not online, which makes it incumbent on people like Musk to clearly state whether it’s a mock video or if it’s real.
Ironically, Musk was one of the most prominent tech leaders to say that development of AI technologies need to be paused for six months, due to the many concerns that the technology is presenting.
Now, he’s doing the exact opposite — pushing out AI videos on his very powerful social media platform without clearly stating they aren’t real.
In response to Musk sharing the video, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, Mia Ehrenberg, emailed a statement to The Associated Press that read:
“We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
One of the biggest issues facing the U.S. as the presidential election is only a little more than three months away now is that this AI technology is not only high quality but highly accessible. In fact, some of these AI tools are available completely free of charge to anyone who can figure out how to use them.
With AI not regulated at all, it’s hard for anyone to do anything about it.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook attempted to stamp out misleading and blatantly false posts on their sites in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
But, Musk has since bought Twitter — and renamed it X after taking it private — and has changed many policies so users can post almost anything they want.
