Many pieces of AI-generated content are used to express support or fandom for certain candidates. For example, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees’ song “Stayin’ Alive” is shared millions of times on social mediaincluding Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican.

“It’s all about social signaling. It’s all the reasons why people are sharing this stuff. It’s not AI. You’re seeing the effects of a polarized electorate,” said Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s not like we’ve had perfect elections in our history and now suddenly there’s AI and it’s all misinformation.”

But don’t get it wrong the misleading deepfakes that spread this election. For example, in the days before the elections in Bangladesh, Deepfakes are being spread online at an alarming rate supporters of one of the country’s political parties to boycott the vote. Sam Gregory, program director of the nonprofit Witness, which helps people use technology to support human rights and runs a rapid response analysis program for civil society organizations and journalist, says his team has seen an increase in cases of deepfakes this year.

“In many election contexts,” he said, “there are examples of truly deceptive or confusing use of synthetic media in audio, video, and image formats that confuse journalists or make it impossible for them to fully verify “What this reveals, he says, is that the tools and systems currently in place to detect AI-generated media are lagging behind the pace of technology development. In areas outside of US and Western Europe, these identification tools not very reliable.

“Fortunately, AI in fraudulent ways has not been used on a large scale in most elections or in significant ways, but it is very clear that there is a gap in the tools to identify and access it for people who need it,” Gregory said. “This is not the time for complacency.”

The very existence of synthetic media, he says, means that politicians are able to claim that the real media is fake—a phenomenon known as the “liar’s dividend.” In AugustDonald Trump has alleged that images showing large crowds returning to rallies for Vice President Kamala Harris are AI-generated. (They don’t.) Gregory says that in an analysis of all the reports to Witness’ deep-fake force-response force, about a third of the cases were politicians using AI to deny evidence of a real event—many involving leaked conversations.