PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — The 2024 presidential campaign is ramping up with less than three weeks until Election Day.

Security experts are urging voters to be aware of potential scams on social media including fake polling locations and deepfakes — artificial intelligence-generated images, videos, or sounds meant to appear identical to real media.

“I think the biggest thing with artificial intelligence scams and misinformation going around is the validation and verification to make sure you were getting it from a source that you can trust,” said cyber security expert Patrick Laverty. “One that you know is going to be that source themselves, not something that could possibly be made up like a little video you see on social media.”

A new study from the Pew Research Center showed more than 50% of Americans are highly concerned that AI will be used to create fake or misleading information about the 2024 candidates and campaigns.

“I think some of the big things that voters should look for is anything that doesn’t really make sense. Anytime that they are concerned about it they should probably go to a canonical source, the main source,” explained Laverty.

Congressman Jim Langevin is the chair of the Institute for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies at Rhode Island College. He believes that AI can have positive and negative impacts as election season is in full swing.

“Campaigns are certainly using it to their advantage, to get out a message or analyze vast amounts of data quickly for candidates, there’s something a campaign can generate, respond more quickly, or is a message that the campaign wants to develop, based on some situation, they can generate content and send it out quickly, especially in targeted, email messages or digital advertisement,” said Langevin.

Langevin told 12 News more needs to be done on the legislative level to prevent people from falling victim to fake AI-generated content online.

“When you talk about, generating deepfakes, whether it’s image, voice, video, digital content, there is a concern that it can be used for, for nefarious kind of reasons,” said Langevin. “It’s very hard to detect, I’ve seen some of these images or the AI-generated voice that is not the actual person stating these things, or it looks like they’re saying these things and are very believable.”

Several pieces of legislation regarding AI have been introduced in Rhode Island this year, with many currently having a status of pending.

“Government hasn’t done enough to either regulate or legislate in terms of requiring things like digital watermark locking for when AI content is generated. The technology hasn’t really been mature enough to develop yet to actually be able to identify when something is AI generated,” said Langevin.

Foreign interference in the election is another concern that Langevin is worried about.

“Election security is a primary concern for government,” said Langevin. “Right now, the government is trying to do everything possible to secure our elections and prevent foreign interference.”

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