Samriddhi Sakunia
In February, ahead of elections in India, the Indian National Congress, the chief opposition party, shared a parody video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Instagram. It used AI tools to superimpose his face on that of Justh, an Indian singer whose song “Chor” (“Thief”) went viral on social media. Producers slightly changed its lyrics, cloned Modi’s voice and paired it with animated visuals of the leader with industrialist Gautam Adani. The video was a gibe on their closeness that had led to Adani’s acquiring several airports, seaports and power plants in the country after Modi’s ascent to power in 2014.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also responded with an AI-generated video. In it, senior Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi’s face had been superimposed on that of Tejashwi Yadav, an opposition leader in Bihar. It was made to seem as if he was addressing Mamata Banerjee, a leader who had broken with the Congress-led alliance just before the elections. It was a dig at the fragile relations in the opposition bloc.
This exchange marked the onset of an AI-driven war and paved the way for a new way of political campaigning in the country, where AI tools, such as voice cloning, conversational bots, personalized video and text messaging, QR codes to click selfies, hologram boxes and deepfake technology were employed by political parties to reach out to voters and take jabs at one another.
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