AI disinformation spreading before Bangladesh polls

Pro-government news outlets and influencers in Bangladesh have in recent months promoted AI-generated disinformation created with cheap tools offered by start-ups, according to a report by Financial Times.

As concerns about Artificial Intelligence-generated disinformation in influencing voters are growing worldwide ahead of crucial elections in the US, the UK, India and Indonesia next year, the report says the concerns have turned into reality in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is heading to the polls in early January, a contest marked by a bitter and polarising power struggle between incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her rivals, the opposition BNP, reads the report.

The FT report put forward examples of disinformation created using AI tools.

In one purported news clip, an AI-generated anchor lambasts the US, a country that Sheikh Hasina’s government has criticised ahead of the polls. A separate deepfake video, which has since been removed, showed an opposition leader equivocating over support for Gazans, a potentially ruinous position in Bangladesh with strong public sympathy for Palestinians.

Facing pressure, Google and Meta have recently announced policies to start requiring campaigns to disclose if political adverts have been digitally altered.

But the examples from Bangladesh show not only how these AI tools can be exploited in elections but also the difficulty in controlling their use in smaller markets that risk being overlooked by American tech companies.

According to the report, the AI disinformation campaign in Bangladesh is “still at an experimentation level”  — with most created using conventional photo or video editing platforms — it showed how it could take off considering the mass accessibility of AI technologies and tools.

In one video posted on X in September by BD Politico, an online news outlet, a news anchor for “World News” presented a studio segment — interspersed with images of rioting — in which he accused US diplomats of interfering in Bangladeshi elections and blamed them for political violence.

The video was made using HeyGen, a Los Angeles-based AI video generator that allows customers to create clips fronted by AI avatars for as little as $24 a month.

AKM Wahiduzzaman, a BNP official, said that his party asked Meta to remove such content, but “most of the time they don’t bother to reply”. Meta removed the video after being contacted by the Financial Times for comment.

Experts in Bangladesh said the problem is exacerbated by the lack of regulation or its selective enforcement by authorities.

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, a Tech Global Institute founder and former Meta executive, said a greater threat than the AI-generated content itself was the prospect that politicians and others could use the mere possibility of deepfakes to navigate uncomfortable information.

In neighbouring India, for example, a politician responded to a leaked audio in which he allegedly discussed corruption in his party by alleging that it was fake — a claim subsequently dismissed by fact-checkers.

“It’s easy for a politician to say, ‘This is deepfake’, or ‘This is AI-generated’, and sow a sense of confusion,” Diya said, adding that it would be a challenge for the governments, especially in the global south.