According to newly-published research from The Alan Turing Institute, there’s no evidence that AI-enabled misinformation meaningfully impacted the results of the recent UK election and the European elections.

The researchers, based at the Institute’s Centre of Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS), identified only 16 confirmed viral cases of AI disinformation or deepfakes during the UK’s general election, and just 11 during the EU and French elections combined.

However, there are emerging concerns regarding realistic parody or satire deepfakes that, while created with humour in mind, can include misleading elections claims that could be perceived by some voters as fact.

Further, politicians, and particularly women, were targeted with deepfake pornography smears, harming their wellbeing and creating potential risks for their professional reputations.

Additionally, it was discovered that voters confused legitimate political content with material that was AI-generated, highlighting the potential for public confidence to be eroded beyond a general election context.

When it comes to the ways in which AI could in fact be beneficial to the democratic process, the researchers highlighted various examples found in the recent elections.

These include the amplification of environmental issues through clearly-labelled AI-generated parodies from climate campaigners, and fact-checkers such as Full Fact using AI to evaluate political claims more quickly than through human review alone.

The Institute’s latest research comes on the back of a prior study which found limited evidence that AI has stopped a candidate from securing a win when compared their actual result to their expected result.

It also follows a separate study which discovered nearly nine in ten people (87.4%) in the UK were concerned about deepfakes impacting the election results.

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Speaking on the new findings, Sam Stockwell, lead author and research associate at The Alan Turing Institute, said: “Echoing our previous report, there remains no evidence AI has impacted the result of an election, but we remain concerned about the persistent erosion of confidence in what is real and what is fake across our online spaces.”

“It’s right that people are sceptical about the information they see, but by ensuring we use reliable sources, and cross reference them with others, we can all be more confident about getting the information we need to inform our decisions at the ballot box.”