Elon Musk shared a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris on X without disclosure, manipulating her voice to make false statements about President Biden and herself, violating X's own synthetic media policies.
In July 2024, billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), reposted a deepfake video manipulating Vice President Kamala Harris's voice and image. The AI-generated content made it appear Harris was calling President Biden senile and describing herself as an 'ultimate diversity hire' who doesn't 'know the first thing about running the country.' The video was originally posted by X user @MrReaganUSA, who labeled it as 'parody,' but when Musk reshared it to his 191 million followers, he provided no such disclosure, only writing 'This is amazing' with a laughing emoji. The manipulated content parodied Harris's actual campaign ad titled 'We Choose Freedom' by replacing the original audio with AI-generated speech that sounded like Harris. The post garnered nearly 118 million views and appeared to violate X's own policies prohibiting 'synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.' X did not append Community Notes to correct the misinformation. Digital governance experts and politicians, including Senator Amy Klobuchar, criticized Musk for violating his platform's policies. The Harris campaign responded by calling it 'fake, manipulated lies.' This incident occurred during a critical period as Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential frontrunner following Biden's decision to exit the race.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim of manipulating political processes, public opinion, and behavior.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed