Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.

With AI deepfakes, a candidate’s image can be smeared, or softened. Voters can be steered toward or away from candidates — or even to avoid the polls altogether. But perhaps the greatest threat to democracy, experts say, is that a surge of AI deepfakes could erode the public’s trust in what they see and hear.