“The clock is ticking before the next election,” Chaney stated. “While truth in political advertising can be legislated this year based on the minimalist South Australian model, AI presents unique, new challenges.
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“Australia has already been too slow to respond to the emergence of AI-generated content in relation to elections. We must move quickly to learn from what’s happening in other countries and put protections in place as soon as possible.
“AI presents a huge threat to democracies across the world, with deepfakes undermining our ability to believe what we see, and sophisticated algorithms polarising our political views in the pursuit of advertising revenue.”
Greens senator David Shoebridge on Monday stated “urgent regulatory action” was wanted to deal with the problem, given it’s at present not illegal to produce deepfakes to be used in Australian elections.
Labor senator Tony Sheldon, who’s chairing the committee, stated he was alive to the problem and that generative AI had been used to unfold disinformation and deepfakes in latest elections world wide, together with within the US primaries.
“We heard from the AEC that no jurisdiction in the world has yet figured out how to effectively restrict the spread of AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes in elections,” he stated.
“Big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Uber have a long track record of lawlessness and unethical behaviour. We should be very sceptical about trusting them to now do the right thing when it comes to AI.”
Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers on Monday stated the AEC “does not possess the legislative tools or internal technical capability to deter, detect or then adequately deal with AI-generated content”.
He stated that if deepfakes have been authorised and of a political nature like different election materials then they have been authorized underneath present laws.
The commissioner stopped wanting calling for brand new legal guidelines, nevertheless, as a substitute suggesting codes of conduct may very well be efficient.
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“We think that the outcome [of maintaining electoral integrity] can be achieved through discussions on some of the current political initiatives applied to Australia, such as a national digital literacy campaign, additional legislation voluntary and mandatory codes of practice for technology companies, mandatory watermarking or credentialling of AI-generated electoral content, and voluntary codes of conduct to candidates and political parties to effectively be lawful during election campaigns.”
The authorities can also be going through scrutiny for what expertise teams together with the Australian Information Industry Association have referred to as a negligible quantity of funding for AI capabilities on this month’s price range: $39.9 million over 5 years.
Independent progressive assume tank Per Capita on Tuesday referred to as for a brand new “public AI commissioner” to fight an overreliance on foreign-owned AI firms. Currently, US-based tech giants together with OpenAI, Google and Nvidia are powering a lot of Australia’s AI utilization.
“We are in danger of repeating the mistakes we’ve made with social media with AI,” Per Capita director of accountable expertise Jordan Guiao stated.
“By allowing foreign-owned private companies to infiltrate our public services, community consultations and our news media, we’ve ceded control to these giant tech companies. It is essential that Australia has solid plans for our own AI sovereignty.”
Pocock stated the federal authorities’s present strategy – an interim AI advisory panel – was inadequate for grappling with the challenges introduced by AI.
“I don’t think an interim expert advisory panel through to the end of June this year is sufficient,” Pocock stated.
“We need an ongoing, expert, centralised government presence to deal with the development and rollout of artificial intelligence, whether that is in the form of a permanent expert committee or a commissioner as some have proposed.”
The Senate committee will report again to the parliament with its suggestions by September.
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