Avideo that Elon Musk posted on X over the weekend has the voice of Kamala Harris speaking over her first big campaign ad, describing herself damningly as “the ultimate diversity hire” who does not “know the first thing about running the country.”
It is a powerful, devastating twist on the original ad because the voice is unmistakably Harris’.
However, it has been digitally manipulated, most likely by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.
Illustration: Mountain People
X prohibits users from posting media that has been “deceptively altered” and “likely to result in widespread confusion on public issues.”
However, such rules apparently do not apply to Musk himself. The original poster of the video marked it as a parody and got 22,000 views. Musk made no such disclosure when he reposted the video, which had been watched more than 128 million times. Musk’s post of the video only included the caption: “This is amazing,” with a laughing emoji.
That might make him the site’s worst spreader of misinformation.
Musk’s defense on Monday that “parody is legal in America” is itself a joke. Yes, parody is perfectly legal, but as the owner of a social media site, he should know that when influential figures share content without proper context, the original intent — parody or not — gets lost as more people share and reshare.
The Harris video in particular hits on existing criticisms about her being a “deep-state puppet” and on her border security record, making the line between satire and misinformation all the more muddied.
To say that the post was a parody after the fact does not help when tens of millions of people have already watched the video.
However, this is also a regular cop-out for Musk. Remember his “funding secured” tweet about taking Tesla private for US$420 a share, which he later claimed was a weed joke? Wall Street and the US Securities Exchange Commission did not find it very funny.
When he humiliated a cave rescuer that year by calling him a “pedo guy” on X, Musk also claimed in court that he did not mean it literally.
For the Musk faithful, all this juvenile irreverence is what makes him so compelling, but we are likely to see a closely fought US election in November and the stakes are too high for recklessly posting half-truths.
Experts in online misinformation tell me that, anecdotally, Harris has already become a greater target of deepfakes than former US president Donald Trump. With close to 200 million followers and the ability to tweak X’s recommendations or boot people off the platform, Musk can do more than just boost shares of Tesla or cause humiliation: He can influence thousands of voters in swing states.
If Musk can break the rules on posting AI-generated voices, there is a good chance that others will do the same. Musk has not only shown how much traction well-designed AI fakery can get on his site, but how little pushback it can get, too.
Audio deepfakes can be insidious. They are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real voices, hence why they have quickly become a favored tool for scammers. One in 10 people has reported being targeted by an AI voice cloning scam, while 77 percent of these targets lost money to the fraud, according to a survey conducted last year by cybersecurity firm McAfee.
Another study found that humans in a lab setting could detect AI-generated speech about 70 percent of the time, suggesting that in the wild, voice clones are getting harder to discern as they become more sophisticated.
Cloning a voice is also relatively easy thanks to online tools from AI companies such as Eleven Labs and HeyGen, whose products are designed for marketers and podcasters. These companies have rules against generating voice clones of public figures without permission, pornographic imagery or content that infringes copyright, for instance, but tend not to police what their customers create, which is why the best hope for stifling AI-generated misinformation still lies with social media giants such as Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook, TikTok and, unfortunately, Musk’s X.
Musk decimated the platform’s trust and safety team when he bought the company in late 2022, initially with a 30 percent cut in the company’s global safety staff, according to a report from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. Whoever is left to enforce its deepfake policies probably has the toughest job in the tech industry.
Musk seems unable to grasp his responsibility as one of the world’s most powerful media owners as the US heads into a fraught election. He should spend more time mending X’s election integrity efforts or letting his chief executive officer run the business, and less time playing games and sowing lies.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology, and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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