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AI-Generated Voices Amplify Conspiracy Theories on TikTok

2 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Elevenlabs and deployed by Tiktok User @E.News.Tv, Tiktok User @D.News.Tv and 3 others allegedly harmed Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and 7 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsSep 2023 - Oct 2023

What happened

NewsGuard has identified 17 TikTok accounts that have been using AI-generated voices to advance and amplify conspiracy theories and false claims beginning in June 2023. By September 25, 2023, these accounts had amassed over 336 million views and over 14.5 million likes. Videos include baseless claims involving public figures such as Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Jamie Foxx.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. AI Voice Technology Used to Create Conspiracy Videos on TikTok, at Scale
    newsguardtech.com · Coalter Palmer
  2. ‘A.I. Obama’ and Fake Newscasters: How A.I. Audio Is Swarming TikTok
    nytimes.com · Stuart A. Thompson, Sapna Maheshwari

Who was involved

Alleged developer
Elevenlabs
Alleged harmed party
Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Foxx, Joan Rivers, Phil Mcgraw, Yahoo! News, E! News, Tiktok, General Public

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.1.

  • 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."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • 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/...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Political and Economic

    "Political and Economic - Manipulation of political beliefs, damage to political institutions and the effective delivery of government services."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Electoral interference

    "Electoral interference - Generation of false or misleading information that can interrupt or mislead voters and/or undermine trust in electoral processes."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • 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"

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • 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...

    The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)

  • 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...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • 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...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #568 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports