A Socio-Legal Examination Of The Growing Threat Posed By Deepfakes And Generative Artificial Intelligence To The Future General Elections In India In 2024 And Beyond

Sajal Sharma, UPES Dehradun

ABSTRACT

Without a doubt, holding free and fair elections in India, the nation with the largest population in the world, is a huge and difficult task. With severe caste, regional, and religious divisions, the 1.4 billion-person society is complicated. The political system is dealing with unreported election spending and hidden electoral funding for political parties through electoral bonds. The Executive has seriously weakened other state institutions designated by the Constitution to defend democracy, and the media's fairness is at an all-time low.

The swift digitization of society has posed further challenges to electoral fairness, since it has created channels for political forces to disseminate misinformation and propaganda. Though literacy rates in India have reached 77.70%, a significant portion of the electorate lacks the education necessary to evaluate online content on its merits. It is estimated that sixty percent of the electorate actively uses smartphones with a functional internet connection. As a result, the use of generative artificial content and deep fake videos presents a unique challenge to the integrity of the Indian electoral process. Perception, image, and support for caste and religious identities play a major role in Indian politics. Therefore, there is a significant issue with developing technologies like deep fakes in the Indian setting, which allow the insertion of a person's likeness into a video and depict them saying or doing nearly anything using just a series of photos of their face and publicly available software. The proliferation of political satire and, particularly, fake pornography has been made possible by this "deepfake" technology. Given the political climate in India, which has seen numerous scandals involving pornographic CDs, this has grave ramifications.