Synthetic everything is warping America
A shadowy polling firm confessed this week to faking survey results in two marquee races — then claimed the entire operation was a "short-term social experiment" on misinformation.
Why it matters: An AI-enabled flood of synthetic and outright fabricated content is wreaking havoc on reality, poisoning the signals people rely on to understand politics, business and culture.
Catch up quick: Median Strategies, a previously unknown polling outfit with little public footprint, surfaced this summer with two blockbuster surveys that were quickly absorbed into the political conversation.
In Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, Median's fake poll showed democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley by 23 points — reinforcing a broader consensus that cast Hong as the clear favorite.
Crowley ultimately won by half of a percentage point.
In Los Angeles, Median reported Mayor Karen Bass leading city council member Nithya Raman by nearly 12 points.
Bass cited the poll as evidence her campaign was "gaining momentum," only to delete her post after the survey was exposed as bogus.
21-year-old recent college grad Rahil Prakash revealed himself as the person behind Median's operation in an interview with The Guardian.
The intrigue: The rise of prediction markets has added a financial incentive for political manipulation.
The big picture: America's fractured information landscape was already ripe for political manipulation.
The cost of deception is now plummeting thanks to AI, allowing bad actors to manufacture convincing voices, images and identities at enormous scale.
Robocalls using AI to imitate Joe Biden's voice discouraged thousands of people from voting ahead of the 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary.
Political groups have begun weaponizing AI deepfakes in campaign ads, exploiting a patchwork of regulation to depict opponents in compromising situations that never happened.
Businesses are also grappling with terrifying new risks thanks to the mass production of fake people and fake content.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.axios.com — the content belongs to Axios.
