Asia is entering a deepfake era in an election year — can it handle misinformation campaigns?
2024 is set up to be the biggest global election year in history. It coincides with the rapid rise in deepfakes. In APAC alone, there was a surge in deepfakes by 1530% from 2022 to 2023, according to a Sumsub report.
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Ahead of the Indonesian elections on Feb. 14, a video of late Indonesian president Suharto advocating for the political party he once presided over went viral.
The AI-generated deepfake video that cloned his face and voice racked up 4.7 million views on X alone.
This was not a one-off incident.
In Pakistan, a deepfake of former prime minister Imran Khan emerged around the national elections, announcing his party was boycotting them. Meanwhile, in the U.S., New Hampshire voters heard a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s asking them to not vote in the presidential primary.
Deepfakes of politicians are becoming increasingly common, especially with 2024 set up to be the biggest global election year in history.
Reportedly, at least 60 countries and more than four billion people will be voting for their leaders and representatives this year, which makes deepfakes a matter of serious concern.
According to a Sumsub report in November, the number of deepfakes across the world rose by 10 times from 2022 to 2023. In APAC alone, deepfakes surged by 1,530% during the same period.
Online media, including social platforms and digital advertising, saw the biggest rise in identity fraud rate at 274% between 2021 and 2023. Professional services, healthcare, transportation and video gaming were were also among industries impacted by identity fraud.
Asia is not ready to tackle deepfakes in elections in terms of regulation, technology, and education, said Simon Chesterman, senior director of AI governance at AI Singapore.
In its 2024 Global Threat Report, cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike reported that with the number of elections scheduled this year, nation-state actors including from China, Russia and Iran are highly likely to conduct misinformation or disinformation campaigns to sow disruption.
“The more serious interventions would be if a major power decides they want to disrupt a country’s election — that’s probably going to be more impactful than political parties playing around on the margins,” said Chesterman.
Although several governments have tools (to prevent online falsehoods), the concern is the genie will be out of the bottle before there’s time to push it back in.
Simon Chesterman
Senior director AI Singapore
However, most deepfakes will still be generated by actors within the respective countries, he said.
Carol Soon, principal research fellow and head of the society and culture department at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore, said domestic actors may include opposition parties and political opponents or extreme right wingers and left wingers.
Deepfake dangers
At the minimum, deepfakes pollute the information ecosystem and make it harder for people to find accurate information or form informed opinions about a party or candidate, said Soon.
Voters may also be put off by a particular candidate if they see content about a scandalous issue that goes viral before it’s debunked as fake, Chesterman said. “Although several governments have tools (to prevent online falsehoods), the concern is the genie will be out of the bottle before there’s time to push it back in.”
“We saw how quickly X could be taken over by the deep fake pornography involving Taylor Swift — these things can spread incredibly quickly,” he said, adding that regulation is often not enough and incredibly hard to enforce. “It’s often too little too late.”
Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, said that deepfakes may also invoke confirmation bias in people: “Even if they know in their heart it’s not true, if it’s the message they want and something they want to believe in they’re not going to let that go.”
Chesterman also said that fake footage which shows misconduct during an election such as ballot stuffing, could cause people to lose faith in the validity of an election.
On the flip side, candidates may deny the truth about themselves that may be negative or unflattering and attribute that to deepfakes instead, Soon said.
Who should be responsible?
There is a realization now that more responsibility needs to be taken on by social media platforms because of the quasi-public role they play, said Chesterman.
In February, 20 leading tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, IBM as well as Artificial intelligence startup OpenAI and social media companies such as Snap, TikTok and X announced a joint commitment to combat the deceptive use of AI in elections this year.
The tech accord signed is an important first step, said Soon, but its effectiveness will depend on implementation and enforcement. With tech companies adopting different measures across their platforms, a multi-prong approach is needed, she said.
Tech companies will also have to be very transparent about the kinds of decisions that are made, for example, the kinds of processes that are put in place, Soon added.
But Chesterman said it is also unreasonable to expect private companies to carry out what are essentially public functions. Deciding what content to allow on social media is a hard call to make, and companies may take months to decide, he said.
“We should not just be relying on the good intentions of these companies,” Chesterman added. “That’s why regulations need to be established and expectations need to be set for these companies.”
Towards this end, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a non-profit, has introduced digital credentials for content, which will show viewers verified information such as the creator’s information, where and when it was created, as well as whether generative AI was used to create the material.
C2PA member companies include Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Intel.
OpenAI has announced it will be implementing C2PA content credentials to images created with its DALL·E 3 offering early this year.
“I think it’d be terrible if I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not worried. I feel great.’ Like, we’re gonna have to watch this relatively closely this year [with] super tight monitoring [and] super tight feedback.”
Sam Altman
CEO OpenAI
In a Bloomberg House interview at the World Economic Forum in January, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman said the company was “quite focused” on ensuring its technology wasn’t being used to manipulate elections.
“I think our role is very different than the role of a distribution platform” like a social media site or news publisher, he said. “We have to work with them, so it’s like you generate here and you distribute here. And there needs to be a good conversation between them.”
Meyers suggested creating a bipartisan, non-profit technical entity with the sole mission of analyzing and identifying deepfakes.
“The public can then send them content they suspect is manipulated,” he said. “It’s not foolproof but at least there’s some sort of mechanism people can rely on.”
But ultimately, while technology is part of the solution, a large part of it comes down to consumers, who are still not ready, said Chesterman.
Soon also highlighted the importance of educating the public.
“We need to continue outreach and engagement efforts to heighten the sense of vigilance and consciousness when the public comes across information,” she said.
The public needs to be more vigilant; besides fact checking when something is highly suspicious, users also need to fact check critical pieces of information especially before sharing it with others, she said.
“There’s something for everyone to do,” Soon said. “It’s all hands on deck.”
— CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos and Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Read the full Bloomberg story here.
— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
WATCH: Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital’s Chris Ballard
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
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