Maria Ressa: AI, deep fakes 'threaten democracy'
Philippine investigative journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa warns of a "tipping point" for democracy worldwide next year. "If you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections," she said.
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00:00 2024 is going to be a very busy election year for a number of countries, especially around Asia.
00:07 What do you see as a new kind of manipulation of artificial intelligence in this coming election,
00:15 especially like in Asia, there's a huge youth population that is online?
00:20 Yeah, it's not new. It's just going to get significantly worse, right? We already know
00:27 with AI of social media that we have been polarized, right? This is the friends of
00:34 friends algorithm of Facebook, for example, polarized our societies. That is part of the
00:41 reason we live in filter bubbles. The shared reality we used to have is gone. And so once
00:51 you're polarized, and this is a very simple thing. We lived through this in the Philippines
00:56 when Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016. News organizations didn't debate fact or fiction. We
01:04 didn't debate reality. We were pretty much, we all agreed on the reality. But if you're pro-Duterte,
01:11 the friends of friends algorithm of Facebook, which is how it grows, and it's not just Facebook,
01:17 it's Twitter. It's gotten worse on X now. Friends of friends, if you're pro-Duterte,
01:23 you move further right. If you're anti-Duterte, you move further left. 2016, 2017, 2018,
01:31 20, over time, it gets worse and worse, right? Not much has been done about this. Now we replace
01:36 Duterte with every other digital populist, authoritarian style leader that has used
01:43 artificial intelligence, that has used social media to grow their base, right? You're seeing
01:51 the rise of the far right in most of the countries around the world now. And there's a linked network
01:58 online that actually helps each other. So let me go to your question. Deep fakes, which isn't
02:06 really even generative AI, you can now, I can make you say and do things you never said or did.
02:12 And it's very easy and it's very cheap, cheaper than it was before. We will be inundated
02:20 with lies, with audio, with video, with text, and we will not be able to tell fact from fiction.
02:31 Our shared reality has already been torn apart, right? Why is this critical? Because one in three
02:39 people all around the world will be voting next year. If you don't have integrity of facts,
02:45 you cannot have integrity of elections. So I think it's been a few years now that based on our data,
02:53 we've been warning the tipping point is going to happen in 2024. Will democracy survive, right?
03:01 You have the three largest democracies around the world. The EU will have its elections here,
03:07 right? But you have India, the world's largest democracy. You have Indonesia, the world's
03:15 largest Muslim population. That's in February. You have the United States. More than that,
03:20 starting in January, Taiwan. Taiwan, which is being bombarded by disinformation from China,
03:27 right? So this is a global problem. But what's at stake here is that how do you find a solution
03:36 when the incentive of profit is what is driving the way we connect to each other? And then the
03:43 other part is the very nation states that have to find a way to put guardrails on the tech
03:49 are themselves becoming weaker and weaker. Every day, they let the tech go unencumbered.
03:58 And we're seeing this play out, right? So, wow, I sound so bleak.
04:04 I know. Where is the hope in this? I know you to be an internal optimist, Maria.
04:09 Where is the hope in this? Anna, we have to wake up. We have to move into the real world and protect
04:16 our democracies. We have to give real life to what civic engagement means. If you are a citizen of a
04:24 democracy, this is the time to get up and move, because if you don't, you will lose it.
04:30 How important are virtual election campaigns? And what does this mean for the very foundation
04:36 of a democratically elected government? I think like everything, the entire world is upside down
04:43 right now. And part of it is because the social media platforms, the companies that connect us,
04:50 actually use an incentive structure that rewards lies, that spreads lies faster than facts. This
04:59 is part of what has created alternative realities. This is part of the reason trust has been broken
05:05 and why our shared reality has been torn apart. So, you're talking about two different things,
05:11 right? You can say, yes, we'll organize a campaign and let people know democracy is going to die,
05:18 right? Or you can be a government that has limitless resources and organize an information
05:25 warfare against the atomized citizens of a country. This is something Russia did in the
05:33 US elections in 2016. This is something we weathered in Rappler, right, underneath the
05:39 Duterte administration on almost an hourly basis. I was getting 98 messages per hour.
05:45 So, there is geopolitical power play using this technology to insidiously manipulate us
05:52 to influence a vote. Then there is also the response to that, right? Let me give you some
06:00 bright spots. All right. Okay? Poland is a bright spot. Poland came through, right? It seemed like
06:09 the incumbent should have won. All the power was on that side, but who mobilized? The women
06:17 and the youth. They moved into physical world, into the real world, and they realized this was
06:22 a moment they couldn't waste, and they didn't. But there are many other countries around the world
06:29 where it comes at us too late. So, it is possible to come out of really bad places, but the time,
06:40 the window, is very small. This is it. And we have to act now. Thank you very much, Maria, for joining us.
06:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]