Arizona election officials have received specialized training to combat deepfake threats before the election

In the swing state of Arizona, election officials are being trained on how to differentiate between artificial intelligence-generated “deepfake” videos and real ones as they brace themselves for potential misinformation ahead of and during the 2024 general election.

In a December 2023 training, election officials were greeted by a video from Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wishing them luck in the training. Deepfakes are videos in which a real person, oftentimes celebrities or politicians, are manipulated using AI to say typically false information.

“We are very excited that all of you are here,” Fontes says in the video. “You are on the front lines, and this exercise is a prime opportunity for you to hone your skills by experiencing new challenges as a team.”

After completing the training over the course of two days, election officials were told Fontes’s address was in fact a deepfake.

“By the end of the second day, you’re like: Trust no one,” Dana Lewis, the county recorder in Pinal County who participated in the training, said, per the Washington Post.

Fontes said this was the first election training to include deepfakes as a part of their training against threats of misinformation. He said AI is troubling because it preys on the public’s view that videos from trusted sources, like elected officials, should be true when in fact they are not.

“It’s just kind of a faster, broader and deeper dissemination [of disinformation]” Fontes said.

Fontes said AI is “a new version of the same old threats: misinformation, disinformation, misleading information.”

As a part of the training, people representing the majority of Arizona’s counties were sorted into 10 teams. Each team was then assigned to a made-up county with a limited budget to reflect budgets that can constrain election workers. They went through exercises about potential threats AI could pose to them during the election.

“It’s very much like role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons,” Fontes said. “You’ve got to make decisions in the moment. And there’s an element of surreality. It’s kind of real, but it’s not.”

The training wasn’t too far from reality; in January, some New Hampshire voters received a phone call from an AI-generated voice that sounded like President Joe Biden urging them not to vote in the state’s primary.

Election officials said they are already dealing with misinformation this election season, but new AI-generated tools allow that information to spread faster and look more official.

At the conclusion of the training, election workers were congratulated by the fake Fontes, this time with information that would likely clue them in on it being a deepfake.

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“I’m going to call it a day, relax a little bit on our back patio, and watch my son practice ice hockey on the frozen lake behind our house here in Phoenix,” the video says.

Fontes’s son does not play ice hockey, and a frozen lake would not survive the Phoenix heat.