Ullekh NP speaks with Mumbai-based cybercrime investigator Ritesh Bhatia on the use and misuse of Generative Artificial Intelligence in elections

Bhatia, the founder of Mumbai-based V4WEB Cybersecurity, is a TEDx speaker who has over the past more than two decades solved complex cases of cybercrime involving corporations as well as individuals. He is widely respected for his efforts to spread awareness about cyber attacks, be it on institutions or on children.

In this conversation, he dwells on why India’s election campaign of 2024 will be drastically different from those in the previous two national polls which, too, had seen an influx of technology. “We are in a scary period,” Bhatia notes and regrets that in the media and elsewhere, there isn’t enough discussion about the potential for misuse of AI in elections in India as much as in other poll-bound countries (like Argentina, the US, UK). He attributes it to the lack of awareness on the part of most stakeholders, including the government. “Maybe they don’t understand the damage any such misuse of AI can do to them,” he says.

He emphasises that the danger of AI-generated fakes is that it is nearly impossible to distinguish them from reality and therefore poses a grave challenge for fact-checkers. Bhatia also talks about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, other generative AI apps, the user-friendliness of AI apps, the dark net, deep fakes, bots, regulations that are in order, data leakage, and so on.