Incident 756: Deepfake of Kamala Harris Saying Damaging Comments Circulates on X and Is Amplified by Elon Musk

Description: The X user @MrReaganUSA uploaded a deepfake of Kamala Harris saying damaging comments about Joe Biden and her own qualifications for the presidency, originally marking it as a parody. The post was shared and amplified eight hours later via Elon Musk's account without the disclaimer.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
756
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2024-07-26
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation

Risk Domain

  1. Malicious Actors & Misuse

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X’s Policies
nytimes.com · 2024

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has waded into one of the thorniest issues facing U.S. politics: deepfake videos.

On Friday night, Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, reposted an edited campaign video for Vic…

Elon Musk Shares Kamala Harris Deepfake
rollingstone.com · 2024

Billionaire Elon Musk shared a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris manipulated to make it sound like she spoke about President Joe Biden's "senility" and that she does not "know the first thing about running the country."

"I, Kam…

Elon Musk retweets altered Kamala Harris campaign ad
nbcnews.com · 2024

Elon Musk, the owner of X, retweeted a parody Kamala Harris campaign ad Friday without labeling it as misleading, an apparent violation of his own platform’s rules.

Segments of video in the altered content — such as Harris, the presumed Dem…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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