LONDON - Since the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal laid bare the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) in that year’s United States’ presidential election in a case of fiddling that - in tandem with AI-aided efforts by adversarial state actors - may well have tipped the balance in favor of and propelled Donald Trump’s ultimate win of the presidency in that no-holds-barred contest, ever more instances of AI disinformation and misinformation and other such tricks to influence the course of balloting have come to light throughout the world. 

These cases of AI election meddling, which have and are occurring both in the US and elsewhere - with the recent voting in India’s national elections providing a cautionary tale as deepfakes and other AI chicanery abounded, including a video purporting to show a politician who died in 2018 campaigning, per the BBC - should sound the alarm, as 4.2 billion people around the globe are set to cast their votes this year in the largest global voter turnout ever, as the World Economic Forum projected in January. 

Oxford, United Kingdom-based think tank the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism conducted a study of chatbots’ replies to queries about the just-held Eur