Nascent U.S. and EU regulations and nonbinding private sector efforts on artificial intelligence (AI) tools will likely fail to meaningfully control the influx of AI content on social media platforms during the 2024 elections in both territories, opening the door to the proliferation of malign synthetic content. In the past several weeks, governments and technology companies have intensified their focus on the potentially negative impact of generative AI tools on election processes. On March 14, the European Commission requested information from eight major social media platforms on their efforts to mitigate risks to electoral processes linked to generative AI, including so-called ''hallucinations'' (when chatbots output false responses) and ''deepfakes'' (malign synthetic audio or visual content meant to deceive audiences). A month earlier, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2024, 20 leading technology companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Snap, Stability AI, TikTok and X, signed a series of...
