AI is having its moment – or more – in politics

It didn’t get a ton of attention at the time, but Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned about this in early April at the annual “Worldwide Threats” hearings in Congress, predicting the rise of “more interconnected, asymmetric threats to U.S. interests.”

“New technologies — particularly in the fields of AI and biotechnologies,” she said, “are being developed and proliferating faster than companies and governments are able to shape norms governing their use, protect against privacy challenges associated with them, and prevent dangerous outcomes that they can trigger.”

The “faster than companies and governments are able to shape norms” part certainly sounds like the creation threatening to escape the creator.

It looks like some folks in Congress are noticing, according to reporting from my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker, who noted A.I. image generators and other technology have become “an instrument of political messaging, mischief and misinformation.”

Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) has introduced legislation requiring “disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads,” Isaac reported. (Think “I approve of this message” but “I used AI to make this.”)

• “Our current laws don’t begin to scratch the surface with respect to protecting the American people from what the rapid deployment of AI can mean in disrupting society,” Clarke told Isaac in an interview.

“The immediate impetus for her bill, she said, was an ad released last week by the RNC that used AI-generated images to paint a dystopian picture of a potential second term for Biden. Designed to answer Biden’s announcement that he was running for reelection, the 30-second spot included fake visuals of China invading Taiwan and immigrants overwhelming the Southern border, among other scenarios. The ad included a disclaimer in the upper left corner that read, ‘Built entirely with AI imagery.’”

The administration checks in

There have been years of warnings about the possibility of fooling voters with realistic “deep fakes” — check out Jordan Peele delivering a message as a counterfeit Barack Obama in 2018, a lifetime ago in tech — but the dam seems to have broken with tools like Chat GPT.

In early April, President Biden met with his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to discuss AI, and specifically “the potential risks to our society, to our economy, to our national security” and “ensuring responsible innovation and appropriate guardrails.”

• Asked whether AI was dangerous, Biden replied: “It remains to be seen. It could be.”

On Thursday, Vice President Harris will meet with chief executives from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic Thursday for a “frank discussion” about how to mitigate dangers in the “current and near-term,” CNBC’s Ashley Capoot reported.

Biden’s reelection campaign declined to say whether it had internal rules of the road for using A.I. in its public-facing materials. The Democratic National Committee has begun testing the use of A.I. for writing fundraising emails, Shane Goldmacher recently reported at the New York Times.

What about the institutions covering the 2024 campaign?

The Washington Post “is ambitiously pursuing new ways to integrate emerging technologies in service of high quality news output,” a spokesperson said. “The company is actively exploring bold and immediate opportunities to use generative AI that uphold the journalistic rigor our readers rely on us for.”

“People complained about disinformation in the 2020 election. They haven’t seen anything yet,” Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, told my colleague Camila DeChalus. “2024 is going to be a lot worse.”

AI’s potential danger to current economic arrangements is increasingly obvious. IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg’s Brody Ford in a recent interview that the company expects to pause hiring for jobs that may be replaced with A.I. in coming years.

• “Hiring in back-office functions — such as human resources — will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said in an interview. These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers, Krishna said. ‘I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,’” Ford reported. (That’s about 7,800 jobs.)

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

But there’s also the much bigger picture. Cade Metz of the New York Times reported this week that Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes dubbed the godfather of A.I., quit his job at Google “so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I.”

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton told the Times. Scientists should not “scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”

See an important political story that doesn’t quite fit traditional politics coverage? Flag it for us here.

Prosecutors near charging decision in Hunter Biden case

“Prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge President Biden’s son Hunter with tax- and gun-related violations, according to people familiar with the matter, the culmination of a four-year investigation that Republicans have sought to portray as evidence the Biden family is corrupt,” Devlin Barrett, Matt Viser, Josh Dawsey and Perry Stein report.

Fed set to raise rates by 0.25 percentage points and consider a pause

“The Federal Reserve is slated to raise interest rates for the 10th time in just over a year, as officials continue their fight against inflation amid growing fears of a recession,” Rachel Siegel reports.

NATO to open Japan office, deepening Indo-Pacific engagement

“NATO is planning to open a liaison office in Tokyo, the first of its kind in Asia, Nikkei Asia has learned. The station will allow the military alliance to conduct periodic consultations with Japan and key partners in the region such as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand as China emerges as a new challenge, alongside its traditional focus on Russia,” Nikkei Asia’s Ken Moriyasu, Rieko Miki Takashi Tsuji report.

Democratic Rep. Colin Allred to challenge Sen. Ted Cruz for Senate seat

“Democratic Rep. Colin Allred (Tex.) will challenge two-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2024, Allred announced Wednesday morning,” Amy B Wang and Liz Goodwin report.

Clyburn endorses Rep. Lee in California Senate race, breaking with Pelosi

“Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) on Wednesday announced his endorsement of Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) in the competitive Democratic Senate primary in California, breaking with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is supporting Rep. Adam B. Schiff,” John Wagner reports.

Lunchtime reads from The Post

A quiet Congress ducks as debt ceiling date looms

“With as few as four weeks until the U.S. government could experience an unprecedented, catastrophic default, the world’s greatest deliberative body simply isn’t deliberating. The sleepy Senate is now playing a bit role in the battle over the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much the United States can borrow to cover its own expenses,” Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell report.

• “The chamber’s absence from the debate is just one of several dark clouds looming over the debt ceiling issue. The exact deadline is uncertain, the congressional calendar is sparse, the politics are difficult and the negotiations are only just getting underway, with little sign any of the key players are willing to budge as the days tick down.”

Zelensky says White House told him nothing about Discord intelligence leaks

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has not had any conversations with the White House about a massive leak of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents, he said in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post on Monday, calling the disclosures damaging to both Washington and Kyiv. Zelensky learned about the disclosures like everybody else — in the news,” Isabelle Khurshudyan reports.

Spike in Russian combat deaths fuels fears of worse carnage to come

“The rate at which Russian forces are being killed or wounded in Ukraine has spiked in recent months, according to estimates disclosed by the White House this week, underscoring how ferocious the combat has become and suggesting the carnage could get even worse with Kyiv’s long-planned counteroffensive to retake occupied territory,” Dan Lamothe and Isabelle Khurshudyan report.

Frequent shootings put U.S. mass killings on a record pace

“The Mojave slayings over the weekend represented the 19th mass killing of the year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University. That is the most during the first four months of the year since data was first recorded in 2006. The Oklahoma deaths have not been added to the database as of Tuesday afternoon,” the Associated Press’s Stefanie Dazio, Larry Fenn and Colleen Slevin report.

The AI political campaign is here

“A transformative and largely untested technology looks set to revolutionize political campaigning: artificial intelligence. But the computer-generated content, which blurs the line between fact and fiction, is raising concerns ahead of the 2024 presidential election,” CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and Yahya Abou-Ghazala report.

• “The Republican National Committee threw down the gauntlet last week when it released a 30-second advertisement responding to President Joe Biden’s official announcement that he would seek reelection in 2024.”

Biden orders 1,500 more troops to Mexico border amid migration surge

“The Biden administration will send 1,500 additional troops to augment security at the southern border, U.S. officials said Tuesday, as the looming end of pandemic-era immigration policies has officials bracing for a surge in illegal crossings,” Alex Horton and Nick Miroff report.

Deal with Mexico will allow U.S. to deport non-Mexicans at border

“The Biden administration has reached a deal with the Mexican government that for the first time will allow U.S. authorities to deport non-Mexican migrants who entered the United States illegally back across the border, according to a joint statement by both nations issued late Tuesday,” Nick Miroff reports.

Biden’s new strategy on judges

“[Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.)] health-related absence from the Judiciary Committee looked like it might bring Biden confirmations to a halt in the Senate, where Democrats have a razor-thin majority. But Biden officials have begun a coordinated effort to work more closely with senators, including Republicans, about judicial vacancies in their home states,” Axios’s Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson reports.

How Black turnout dropped during the 2022 midterms, visualized

“Black voter turnout dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, from 51.7 percent in 2018 to 42 percent in 2022, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Census Bureau’s turnout survey. White voter turnout slipped by only 1.5 points to 53.4 percent. The 11-point turnout gap between White and Black voters is the largest in any presidential or midterm election since at least 2000,” Scott Clement and Lenny Bronner report.

N.C. Republicans unveil 12-week abortion ban after secret negotiations

“Republicans in North Carolina introduced a plan on Tuesday to ban abortion in the state after 12 weeks of pregnancy, a move that would significantly narrow the window for legal abortions but stop short of the more-restrictive bans that have been enacted in other Southern states,” Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein report.

• “In North Carolina on Tuesday, female Republican lawmakers took a leading role in introducing the legislation at a surprise press conference, which capped months of closed-door deliberations among Republicans, many of whom had been pushing for a six-week ban. The lawmakers repeatedly claimed that the 12-week ban would be widely popular with residents of North Carolina, describing the proposal as a ‘mainstream’ approach to the issue.”

Republicans aim to disrupt general election debates amid Trump complaints

“Top Republicans summoned the bureau chiefs of the five major television networks to the party’s Capitol Hill headquarters this spring for a secret meeting aimed at breaking the country’s 35-year-old system for presidential debates,” Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey report.

• “With everyone in the same room, the Republican National Committee’s leadership wanted to know if the networks would agree to broadcast 2024 general election debates that were sponsored by a third-party organization other than the Commission on Presidential Debates, according to six people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The nonprofit commission has staged the events since 1988.”

At 12:45 p.m., Biden and Harris will have lunch.

Biden and Harris will host a dinner for Combatant Commanders at 6:30 p.m.

Time to settle in for the long haul

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.