Disinformation alarm in Slovakia fuelled by AI

(ANSA) - ROME, OCT 4 - During the election campaign in Slovakia, social media were allegedly flooded with videos and recordings generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in order to spread disinformation. The technique used is that of deepfakes, synthetic photos or videos created starting from real content through automatic learning algorithms trained on large quantities of data.
    The most blatant case concerned the diffusion of an audio file in which the opposition candidate, progressive MEP Michal Simecka, is heard talking to a journalist, Monika Tódová, about the votes of the Roma minority which her party, Progressive Slovakia, allegedly bought. A "colossal, evident piece of nonsense," Simecka said on X, accusing his opponents of creating "another fake video with an artificial intelligence voice".
    "At the moment there are no instruments able to detect with absolute certainty content created by AI", but "the recording contains several anomalies and the voices contained in it are not natural", writes the AFP fact-checking team that investigated the affair. The thesis was confirmed by several experts interviewed by the French news agency, as well as by the Demagog organization, Meta's fact-checking partner. The audio, according to the tests carried out by AFP, has racked up several thousand shares on Facebook, Telegram and TikTok.
    "The episode is not an isolated one. Already on the eve of the vote, the Slovakian police had warned against the diffusion of "videos and audio recordings of disinformation", created by using AI, and had issued an appeal to citizens to be "alert" and not allow themselves to be "exploited by interest groups that want to reach their objectives via lies".
    The Vice President of the European Commission, Vera Jourová, also issued an alert in the last few days describing Slovakia as "fertile terrain" for Russian propaganda, maintaining that the vote would be a test of the vulnerability of democratic systems to the "several-million-euro weapon of mass manipulation" in the hands of the Kremlin.
    photo: Election winner Robert Fico (ANSA).