AI incident #988 ·
Senior Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong Allegedly Misrepresented in Two Deepfake Videos on Foreign Relations
What happened
Two deepfake videos falsely depicted Senior Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong commenting on US-China relations and the South China Sea. The videos misleadingly attributed views to him and the Singapore government. Posted on TikTok, the videos amassed over 190,000 views before being removed.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (1)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Unknown Actors Impersonating Lee Hsien Loong
- Alleged harmed party
- Lee Hsien Loong, Government Of Singapore, Singapore United States Relations, Singapore China Relations, Diplomacy
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Malicious Actors & Misuse
- Risk subdomain
- 4.1 Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.1.
- Coercion/manipulation
"Coercion/manipulation - Use of a technology system to covertly alter user beliefs and behaviour using nudging, dark patterns and/or other opaque techniques, resulting in potential erosion of privacy, addiction, anxiety/...
- Electoral interference
"Electoral interference - Generation of false or misleading information that can interrupt or mislead voters and/or undermine trust in electoral processes."
- Political manipulation
"Political manipulation - Use or misuse of personal data to target individuals’ interests, personalities and vulnerabilities with tailored political messages via micro-advertising or deepfakes/synthetic media."
- Political and Economic
"Political and Economic - Manipulation of political beliefs, damage to political institutions and the effective delivery of government services."
- Biased influence through citizen screening and tailored propaganda
"AI-powered chatbots tailor their communication approach to influence individual users' decisions. In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum. In future, there...
- Political
"In the UK, a form of initial computational propaganda has already happened during the Brexit referendum1 . In future, there are concerns that oppressive governments could use AI to shape citizens’ opinions"
- Surveillance and Censorship
"Content moderation has emerged as one of the key use-cases of LLMs (Weng et al., 2023), indicating the potential of LLMs for surveillance and censorship as well (Edwards, 2023). Surveillance and censorship are one of th...
- Disinformation and manipulation of public opinion
"AI, particularly general- purpose AI, can be maliciously used for disinformation (351), which for the purpose of this report refers to false information that was generated or spread with the deliberate intent to mislead...
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