Here's how artificial intelligence is shaping this election season

Lt. Gov. Jay Collins recently reshared a video on X that slammed gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds for supporting data centers.

The thing is... the video he shared was AI-generated.

It shows the Capitol on fire and robots arresting people. A man goes into Donalds' office asking him to get rid of data centers because he has no clean water. The artificially generated Donalds responds saying, "Get this peasant out of my office." Collins is dressed as the Marvel superhero Captain America, kicking and punching out data centers, abortion clinics, and Donalds.

But that’s what most of social media is today — AI-generated.

A recent study from the Media and Journalism Research Center analyzed 40,000 posts from LinkedIn and Facebook and found 90% were either mostly or entirely AI-generated.

AI on social media

When you open a social media app on your phone, you’re immediately using AI.

And it's not just the video or the posts you see — the algorithms working in the background use artificial intelligence to pick out what it thinks you’ll want to watch.

Alex Mahadevan is the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. He said it was easier to spot this type of content a few years ago: are there five fingers? Two pupils? Are the teeth in focus?

“Now it is becoming essentially impossible to tell the difference between an AI-generated deepfake of a politician or an actual video of the politician speaking,” he said.

"I am very concerned about the information ecosystem right now, about the state of social media, (and) about the status of someone's feed as they open up Facebook or Instagram," Mahadevan added. "All they're seeing is AI or rage bait."

That's why Mahadevan is "teaching people that they should be skeptical of the things that they see online." He said as it gets harder to figure out what’s real, viewers have to almost become digital journalists themselves and double-check everything they see and hear.

Joshua Scacco agrees. He leads the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida's Tampa campus.

He said the classic negative attack ad is nothing new. Typically, candidates take their opponents' words out of context or highlight different gaffes and slips-ups.

"In the age of artificial intelligence, candidates and campaigns don't necessarily need to rely only on that moment, they can create essentially a false moment and market it as if it had happened," Scacco said.

Florida law requires AI-generated content that is knowingly false, intended to harm candidates or deceive voters to include a disclaimer saying it was created by AI. The statute requires that type of content to "prominently" display: "Created in whole or in part with the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).”

Collins' shared video does not have one.

But Scacco said while the law gives the illusion of transparency, it doesn’t help people understand the technology’s capabilities, or identify which parts of the ad used AI. He added campaign ads were the original spreaders of disinformation before social media.

“Part of that is free speech capability, which is that free speech covers falsehoods," Scacco said. "What AI does is it puts it on steroids, and it makes it a lot easier to do many of these things.”

A new study from the Pew Research Center found half of adult Americans say the uptick in artificial intelligence is concerning.

Pew Research Center

Fix the loopholes in the law

Marbin Pazos Revilla, a USF cybersecurity expert, said there needs to be tighter restrictions in the law.

"AI is advancing so rapidly, as opposed to the industrial revolution, it took years to get to that point, and even the different advancements that allows us to have that industrial revolution took years to actually materialize," he said. "But here, fairly quick, within weeks, if not days, we already have something new that challenges the previous conceptions that we had of the ability of AI to produce this type of defects or advancements."

He said with the breakneck speed it's advancing, "it's hard not to have loopholes.”

How to fact-check the content

Revilla said it can even be difficult to discern what content is real online, so it’s especially important for voters to know what’s real and what’s not.

If you see something that is hard to believe, you can do a quick search online to see if other reputable news outlets are reporting on the story. If you can't find anything else except the video you saw on social media, that's a red flag.

But it can be hard when short clips get posted and shared so quickly on social media. Remember the saying, if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck? Well, that’s not the case with AI.

Alex Mahadevan said if something seems too good to be true, perfectly aligns with your beliefs, or you agree 100 percent with it, chances are it’s not real.

But he said there are some ways to help you swim through the slop.

“Open that image and zoom all the way in. You can look for inconsistencies in the horizon, like maybe a road disappears where it's not supposed to," Mahadevan said. "Or you can zoom really, really close into someone's buttons, and maybe that button has three holes, and then the other ones have four holes.”

You can also do a reverse image search on Google — on the main page, click the camera button in the search bar. It gives you the option to upload an image, drag and drop one, or paste the image URL there. You can also screenshot a few moments from a video and use those to search.

There are other applications Mahadevan recommends to help you fact-check content and see where the picture originated, like TinEye and InVid.

Collins did not respond to a request for comment.

Want to join the conversation or share your story? Email Meghan at bowman4@wusf.org.

If you have any questions about state government or the legislative process, you can ask the Your Florida team by clicking here.

This story was produced by WUSF as part of a statewide journalism initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.