An independent candidate in the Scottish Parliament election has told Full Fact that the AI-generated “illustrated” videos he shared showing him meeting voters, addressing rallies and visiting primary schools and hospitals do not reflect real-life events.
Two videos show Arzoo Waqar Abdullah, who is running for the Glasgow Southside constituency, conducting various campaign activities.
The post includes a disclaimer describing each video as an “AI scene description.” However, in the original post, this is only mentioned at the end of the caption, and often only appears if the user clicks “See more” in the post’s caption. Therefore, some voters may have watched these videos without any warning that they were not real.
After we contacted Abdullah, he deleted the original post and re-uploaded the video with a disclaimer that it was an “AI scene description” displayed more prominently at the top of the caption. We are grateful to him for engaging with us.
Abdullah said the scenes depicted in the video were “not real events” and added: “The video was always meant to be illustrative and to represent my goals, what I aspire to do, not what happened in the past.”
It is important for all candidates to include clear transparency markers in their campaign materials, and in this case, Full Fact believes Adbra should have included a prominent label at the outset to emphasize that the video was created using AI. The transparency marker requirement is one of Full Fact’s recommendations for stronger rules to tackle political deepfakes in the Representation of the People Bill, which is currently before Parliament at Westminster.
We discovered Abdullah’s video thanks to Full Fact’s AI tools, which are monitoring claims made on social media by more than 1,000 candidates running in May elections across England, Scotland and Wales.
What does the Election Commission say?
We shared Abdullah’s original post with the Election Commission, the body responsible for regulating election campaigns. “We expect those who use AI-generated campaign materials to do so in a way that does not mislead voters and to clearly label them so voters know how they were created.”
The Election Commission is currently piloting a “deepfake detection” system that will “monitor online content intended to mislead voters about the electoral process or falsely portray candidates.”
But they told us that each video in question was labeled as an “AI illustration” and therefore would not have been within the scope of the pilot.
There are many clues that the video was created using AI. For example, the background shows buses that blend into each other, made-up names, nonsensical signs, or stores that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Full Fact’s AI tools also identified that the clip had a SynthID (Google AI’s watermark).
Guides and toolkits for finding AI content can help you find content that may not be all it seems.
