Artificial intelligence and black campaigns, the temptation for candidates in the 2024 electoral – Medium

Artificial intelligence technology can enhance dirty electoral games. Strategists know that these tricks are double-edged swords: if the audacity is discovered and the opponent takes advantage of the situation, the effect can be harmful.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will be a powerful resource for the design and implementation of political campaigns during the electoral processes underway in Mexico, especially because there is evidence that, when the vote is decided, emotions intervene more than reasoning.

Although there is a temptation to use this type of technology to enhance the so-called black campaigns, that is, to defame politicians, the leaders of the war rooms of the candidates who are preparing for the races today know that These tricks are double-edged swords: if the audacity is discovered and the opponent takes advantage of the situation, the effect can be harmful.

Concerns in this regard are not an exclusive matter for Mexico. According to the Global Risks 2024 Report of the World Economic Forum, published a few days ago, social polarization is one of the three main global risks for the coming year.

It highlights that, given that this year around 3 billion people will have the possibility of participating in electoral processes in their respective countries including Mexicans certain actors will use disinformation to widen social and political divisions, which can undermine legitimacy. of the newly elected governments.

Electoral market intelligence tool Campaign strategists consulted by El Economista explained that the use of Artificial Intelligence allows them to do their work easier, cheaper and with more elements to make assertive decisions.

When it comes to communicating, positioning a candidate before the electorate and carrying out propaganda to influence the vote, simulations, trend analysis on social networks and data meta-analysis, particularly applied in electoral market intelligence, are excellent allies.

Anna Laura Montiel lvarez, general director of the consultancy Comunicacin e Imagen, said that it is valuable to integrate artificial intelligence into electoral campaigns to find the specific characteristics of voters: what they like, what they consume, their preferences and what they want. . This helps to segment messages more clearly through images, videos or audios and to make them more striking.

For his part, Rafael Morales, electoral campaign strategist, explained that, in reality, today it is not essential to use artificial intelligence for the design and implementation of electoral campaigns, especially because most of them continue to be done in a very traditional way.

Although many strategists are hiring teams specialized in this type of technology, for the creation of content on social networks, scheduling and dispersion of communication content, it is not being used intensively.

He even said that many use it to make avatars or certain campaign materials, as if to give the signal that they are at the forefront, but they do not use it intensively.

The director of the consultancy Guru Electoral explained that generative artificial intelligence helps as a tool to encourage political polarization, through misinformation or the use of altered videos.

With this, smear campaigns, also known as B-side, could be reinforced to discredit the adversary, artificially generating a scandal.

Black campaigns have a high social cost Anna Laura Montiel lvarez highlighted that the problem is when this technology is used in a negative way, for example, to try to make a candidate look like what he is not.

That has negative consequences. If (with artificial intelligence) you make your candidate beautiful and then people see her on the street and it turns out that she does not look like the images that are spread of her, it simply does not correspond to the expectation that was generated.

On the other hand, she stressed, black campaigns, in which this technology can be used, all they do is distort the idea that voters have of the electoral process and the candidates, which, in the end, clouds decision-making .

Artificial intelligence is beneficial for the construction of electoral campaigns, but one must be very careful to pay attention to the moral values of consultants and candidates when using it, she stressed.

The unethical use of this type of black campaigns has a very high cost, both for the candidates and for the consultants.

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Artificial intelligence and black campaigns, the temptation for candidates in the 2024 electoral - Medium