India’s 2024 general election, the largest in the world, became a showcase for political AI at scale. In an analysis published in The Conversation in June 2024, Harvard Kennedy School researchers Vandinika Shukla and Bruce Schneier documented parties spending an estimated US$50 million on authorized AI-generated content, including AI voice calls that addressed voters by name and discussed their local issues, and personalized WhatsApp videos showing individual voters the government benefits they had received.
Some of the most striking uses revived the dead. In January 2024 the party of former Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi, who died in 2018, presented an authorized deepfake of him appearing at a youth conference in his trademark scarf and dark glasses. An AI-generated audio clip of Jayalalithaa, the Tamil political superstar who died in 2016, was posted by her party’s official account. Alongside these party-sanctioned uses ran a flood of unauthorized deepfakes of candidates and celebrities.
Notably, the authors argued the net effect was not the feared catastrophe. They credited AI with widening access, for example by translating Prime Minister Modi’s speeches into many languages and reaching rural voters, and pointed to the competitive, surprising result as evidence that synthetic media did not simply hand the election to one side.
For a business reader, India shows AI persuasion deployed at population scale, where the same tools that personalize outreach and cross language barriers also normalize synthetic likenesses, including of people who are no longer alive to consent.