Deepfakes Are Everywhere, Yet Their Real Impact on Elections Fell Far Short of Fears
binarybits · x · 2026-10-17
In a discussion about whether AI risk predictions have panned out, tech writer Timothy Lee (@binarybits) argued that while deepfakes did happen, their actual impact on elections so far has been much smaller than most people — including himself — expected three or four years ago.
His counterpart countered that early warnings from the GPT-2/GPT-3 era are materializing: cheap text generation is spamming the web, deepfakes are being abused, and cyber risks (including agent swarms and bad actors) are unfolding now.
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