Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who even by Silicon Valley standards has extraordinarily close ties to the Democrat party, is stoking fears about AI-generated misinformation in the 2024 election.
The tech leader made his comments at the Aspen Ideas festival, an annual gathering of largely neoliberal policymakers and business leaders. Past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Gates.
American Businessman Bill Gates attends a discussion during the ‘Munich Security Conference’ in Munich, Germany, Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during an event at Kuda village, in Little Rann of Kutch on February 6, 2023. (Photo by SAM PANTHAKY / AFP) (Photo by SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images)
In his remarks, Schmidt warned that the upcoming presidential election season will be “full, full of false information that anyone can generate.”
In a sweeping claim, the former Google boss declared “you can’t trust anything that you see or hear,” and that “every side, every grassroots group and every politician will use generative AI to do harm to their opponents.”
Schmidt is also deeply involved in AI policy. According to CNBC, the former Google boss failed to publicly disclose his own investments in AI startups while he was chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), a role that included recommending funding partnerships with private AI companies.
An Axios article on Schmidt’s comments claims that “Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Republicans have used fake images to attack the President earlier this month,” but does not mention the use of AI-generated imagery against Republicans.
In one example promoted by NBC News and Time, woke “LGBTQ+” activists used AI deepfakes to depict Republican politicians in drag.
This fact, and the potential impact it might have on GOP primaries if the pictures were believed to be real, is seldom found in media scare-stories about the use of AI in political campaigns.
Schmidt’s comments came just a week after former Democrat President Barack Obama, whose administration Schmidt worked with closely, made similar doom-laden prophecies about AI deepfakes.
In an interview 0n is former advisor David Axelrod’s CNN podcast, Obama’s made comments highly similar to Schmidt’s: warning that “we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”
At the same time, the former President pushed a solution: “digital fingerprints” to trace the origin of all information “so we know what is true and what is not true.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.