The 2024 election cycle is right around the corner and with that comes massive swaths of information about the candidates and the election itself. With the advent of generative AI and how detailed deep fakes have become, it’s hard to wade through what is real and what is fake. Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley joins the Live show, as part of the weekly series Yahoo Finance’s 2024 Investor Guide, to break down the impact generative AI can have on the election and what people should be on the lookout for.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video Transcript

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JARED BLIKRE: The 2024 US presidential election is in just under a year. As candidates battle it out for the seat and the Oval Office, AI experts are warning on the potential massive upswing in disinformation and misinformation in the campaigns. And here with an investor’s guide for what 2024 can offer and what this means for AI and social media companies, let’s go to now Dan Howley, Yahoo Finance’s own. Dan, what are the details?

DAN HOWLEY: That’s right, Jared. The AI revolution has really supercharged a lot of companies as far as spending and really just generated tons of conversation as to the benefits of it. But there also are some drawbacks and those include the spread of disinformation and misinformation.

Part of that has to do with people being able to generate lifelike images, videos, and audio increasingly of individuals and basically allowing them to manipulate the news. And so we’ve seen some instances of this. There was an image that had spread earlier in the year about appearing to be an explosion outside the Pentagon. It sent shares on Wall Street sliding.

They quickly recovered though because it was clear that this was just a fake. The Pentagon responded saying that there was no explosion at all. Everything was fine and that this was just an AI manipulation.

But we also saw prior to former President Trump’s arrest in New York, images that were generated of him running from police, being gang tackled. We’ve also seen a deepfake of Vladimir Putin speaking to Vladimir Putin. So it’s everywhere now.

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And some of the experts that I spoke to say that we’re going to see a tsunami of disinformation around 2024. So what does this mean for companies? Well, some of the experts I spoke to said, look, it comes down to whether or not they have robust terms and conditions, meaning that they say that what people use their services for have to be law abiding and not for nefarious purposes. And it comes down to reputation.

So if for instance, say, Microsoft’s platforms, or OpenAI’s, or Meta’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, whichever, are used to generate disinformation, then they would take a black eye. Now, does that mean that investors would necessarily pull out or that customers would necessarily pull out? It depends on how big of a black eye that really is. The flip side of things, there’s a social media aspect of this, which we saw issues around during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, where Facebook– excuse me, Meta, Twitter at the time, they pulled back. YouTube pulled back on some of the people that were spreading disinformation and misinformation and tried to clear up the platforms.

We saw, obviously, issues there with share prices. So it really comes down to the moves that the companies make to prevent this and how bad, if it does happen, the reaction will be. And I think that if you look at the terms and conditions of some of the bigger companies, they lay out pretty clearly that you’re not supposed to use their services for anything nefarious, as you would imagine that they would say.