Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. In the small town of Pushkar in northwest India, Deviandra Singh Jadoun is hard at work in his studio. The Vibe is kind of similar to a Silicon Valley startup. In its early days, Jaduna set up a small workshop where he and a handful of coworkers create digital content. He's gone from making Bollywood spoofs to creating videos like this one.
Made Piai Hit Jane made Piai Man Media, Piati Abishek Samson made Pagan Johan.
It appears to be Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, but it's actually a deep fake. Jadoun, who calls himself the Indian deep Faker, is using AI technology to make it seem like Mody is speaking directly to individual voters. In that clip, you hear him sub in four different names. He refers to each of them as my dear. The largest election in history just got under way in India,
and Jadun is in high demand. He makes videos like these and AI chatbots for candidates looking to capitalize on a largely unregulated technology to reach a wider range of constituents quickly and what Jadun is doing is changing how politicians campaign in the world's largest democracy, and that could have implications worldwide as countries grapple with the disinformation risks that come with AI. This year, the stakes are really high.
There are national elections in more than sixty countries, including the US, and this technology doesn't recognize borders. Here's another video from Jadun. You might recognize this voice even if you've never heard him speak in Hindi. Trump Nehihu raji shtumkaka rehu may I slid Trump. Nahihu Tunita tum kaka rehu may I slid Trump. That was a deep fake of Donald Trump from the same public facing highlight reel
Jadoon made that featured the Modi video. In it, Donald Trump is also addressing different people by name and noting he is not the real Donald Trump. On today's show, what a deep fake operation in India tells us about the year ahead when there are elections all over the world and the challenges of regulating this new and fast growing technology. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gerra, really, I promise Diveandra Jadoon is having a pretty busy year. The thirty one year old has
built a business around making deep fakes. At first, his work was mostly entertainment focused.
During COVID, he told me that he started using a lot of these technolology tools where he started making videos and superimposing other celebrities on Bollywood dance videos or superimposing celebrities from Bollywood onto Hollywood movie clips.
That's Bloomberg. Sarita Rye, she covers AI in Asia from her home base in Bangalore, having.
Really clunky little videos. He showed me a few examples. They weren't really very technically advanced.
Sretha says. The advent of Open AI's chat GPT made it easier for Jadune to make higher quality videos, and soon he saw an opportunity to branch into politics in India, where there's a big demand for AI generated videos. There are broadly speaking, two kinds of deep fakes we're seeing in elections this year. There are deep fakes from campaigns who want the next generation AI driven version of a
text message tailored to each voter. The other kind are intentionally misleading videos in which someone's likeness is used without that person's knowledge or consent to influence the outcome. Of an election and told Serita he has ground rules for what kind of work he takes on.
He tells me that he doesn't accept contracts and commissions that come to him directly from candidates. He would rather it come from a digital agency, or an AI agency, or a contractor or even a political party. But he says usually they come through these intermediaries that are contracted by the mainstream parties. He's definitely not playing sides in terms of his work. He's told me that he's working for practically all the major political parties.
What is the operation that he's built up?
Look like he started off as a one man shop, but he since expanded because all of the work that is coming to him. The first time I spoke to him, he said he had a couple of workers, and that was a few months ago, and then he told me now he has five other employees who helped they make these videos.
Making those personalized videos, like the ones of Mody and Trump, involve feeding an AI model audio or video of a person to capture their voice, facial expressions, and movements.
It takes a few days up to a week to train the AI models, but once trained, he can produce these very quickly, like instantly, almost like within minutes, he can make these videos.
Sriita says that in India, politicians are using deep fake videos like jededuns for voter outreach. It's a relatively inexpensive way to appeal to people all over this huge country directly in a way they can't at big campaign rallies, and that's valuable in India, where there are some nine hundred and sixty eight million eligible voters.
The level of hyper personalization that is possible with generative AI. You can just train the model to say the main message and then feed it with house and thousands of memes and it will instantly reproduce that same video and sync it perfectly with Narenermodi calling out each person by name.
The videos are so good, Sarita says, it can be very difficult to discern their deep fakes, especially in a country where technological literacy varies so widely.
These are millions and millions who have their first encounter of any technological device because they have access to a cheap smartphone. They're the ones who have never experienced the Internet except for experiencing it or accessing it through this device for the first time in the last few years. So the kind of impact that AI would have in India is certainly magnified because people are so much more vulnerable to the kind of deceptions that AI can be
used for. I think that really is the power of these AI technologies colliding with the ubiquity of smartphones and the cheap broadband in a country like India where otherwise it would be a really expensive exercise to get out and get the message to the waters.
You said that he can work quickly and it's not extremely expensive.
I'd certainly say it's peanuts compared with what physical campaigning will cost some of these politicians. For instance, if Modi flies is a private plane to get to a remote corner of the country, here morey can address all of those voters with a deep faith personalized, hyper personalized message for a few for maybe six or seven thousand dollars.
Are you able to ascertain the effect that this kind of technology is having and indeed it is likely to have on the election?
Elections were a magical time when all kinds of performers, all kinds of theater, all kinds of stuff came by onto your neighborhood because that was part of the whole, as we call it in India, the election tamasha, which is the election theater, almost very theatrical stuff. But when I look out today outside in my neighborhood, there's hardly any visible sign of an election that is coming up.
And in fact Bangalore where I'm based, is going to vote in a few days, and there is absolutely no sign of any large scale campaigning or any overt display of election material. There are no banners, there are no posters, there is nothing of that sort, which was literally what it used to be like plastered all over the streets, hung on the buildings and everything. None of it. None
of that is happening today. What I and I see that this is a change that technology is bringing about that a lot of the campaigning David is going to be really personalized, in fact hyper personalized to the electors.
On Friday, India began seven rounds of phased voting. The election will continue until June first, and we expect to learn the outcome three days after that. Mody expects to be re elected and Jadoun is anticipating a lot of his work will come days before voting opens. In tighter state races.
A lot of it is going to reach them via their funds, and a lot of it will be AI generated material.
After the break. The challenges of regulating the technology behind deep fase not just in India but all over the world. The explosive growth of generative AI and its potential have made it a challenge to regulate its proponents, to out its potential to boost productivity and, in the case of elections, to reach more voters. But its critics note its pitfalls in an age of heightened disinformation and concerns about cybersecurity, and when it comes to regulation, many governments are unable
or reluctant to move fast in the technologies infancy. In the US, AI legislation is tied up in Congress. The UK is also debating legislation. China does have rules in place for AI companies, but there's little transparency into how they work in practice. The European Union has passed some of the most comprehensive regulations. These could be a blueprint
for lawmakers everywhere. Last year, it adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act, which placed reporting requirements and restrictions on how companies operating in the EU are able to develop and use AI. Blomberg's Gillian Deutsch covered the debate over that law from Brussels.
I think the best way to look at the way the use approaching it is to see that they're not really regulating the technology itself. The regulating the uses of the technology. They're required to submit risk assessments to your opinion, and then these kind of more very serious harms pushed by AI, for example, assigning social scores to citizens based on their behavior, or even using emotional recognition technology in the workplace or in schools, those are fed out banned
in the EU. These are the kind of good enough rules to actually make sure that this kind of scary and obviously very promising technology, the generative AI. Those are the correct guard rills that we should put in place.
But Jillian says, in spite of how this bill is framed and it's splashy rollout, the AI Act is still limited in scope. There's disagreement over how strict regulation should be, and there's fear that regulation will stifle innovation.
There's also a very kind of quick sudden pushback from countries like Germany and France saying actually that those are too many rules and actually Europe is going to shoot itself in the foot. We are the first allegates to place really kind of what we view is very strict requirements on genetic A companies. They will just go elsewhere. They're not going to invest on this continent. And we also need to gain the benefits of AI, not just
over regulate based on the concerns. So what ended up happening is really we have more basic transparency requirements.
Other countries are studying Europe's approach, but many of them are calling on companies to self regulate. I asked reporter Sareita Rye about this. What is the regulatory landscape when it comes to AI look like in India today?
India has no regulation at all when it comes to AI. Certainly there have been attempts to regulate deep fakes on social media. That's kind of a roundabout way of getting there. What India's government has done is asked social media platforms such as Facebook and Google to regulate their own platforms.
The government has told these platforms that when these deep fakes or AI generated content hits these platforms and people bring it to their notice, they have only twenty four hours to take the content down.
Representatives from Meta Alphabet and other tech companies say they're trying to address AI's potential problems. Jillian says, experts assert it's hard to know how big a role deep fakes will play in determining the outcome of elections in twenty twenty four.
We don't want to overemphasize how widespread or how impactful de fakes are, but it obviously has captured a lot of people's attention because this is something very new. It's much cheaper to make, they're much faster to make, they're much more sophisticated than they used to be, and they don't have to influence every single person in a country. You know, a lot of these governments, all of these elections are decided on very small percentile differences.
For the time being, voters will need to bring a critical eye to everything they see online. Jillian points out some deep fakes are harder to detect as fakes than others. Many videos still have telltale signs. There could be too many fingers on someone's hand, or inconsistencies and how clothing or accessories look.
Audio deep figs are even trickier to identify. We have far fewer social cues to see that it's in correct, or that it's been faked.
Soretha says this played out in New Hampshire during the run up to the presidential primaries there in January.
Robocalls using voice cloning technology impersonating Biden asking to vote for a candidate that certainly he wasn't endorsing.
Increasingly, deep fakes are being seen as a serious disinformation threat. There is a fear about how this technology could be used or exploited in American politics. Is there the same apprehension or anxiety in India about the way that this is being used or could be used, or is there just a fascination with kind of the whizbang nature of this.
Certainly, I think the world over there are apprehensions of about how these defates can be used to fool or deceive voters. He's seen it happen in multiple countries, right from Indonesia to Pakistan and even in the US.
But deep fake creators like Diveandra Jadun see opportunity. Sarita says, his business is booming. Does he have designs or a desire to take this work to other countries and get involved in other countries politics.
Divindras told me that He has agents working for him in multiple countries, such as Canada, which is going to an election in twenty twenty five. I think he certainly is ambitious. India has always been known for technology services outsourcing, but AI and election deep fake outsourcing may now see a new lease of life with the likes of Viviendra and this might be a new type of outsourcing. So I think he's building a new business model.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. Today's episode was produced by Alex Sagura. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Tom O'Sullivan. It was mixed by Veronica Rodriguez. It was fact checked by David Fox. Naomi Shavin is our senior producer. Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor. Nicole Beemster Bor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps new listeners
find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.