Policing only deepfakes, Israel leaves chatbot-trusting voters exposed to real AI threat

Yair Lapid, opposition leader and No. 2 on the B’Yachad electoral slate, already has a pretty good idea of where voters will see him and what they will hear as the nation goes to the polls on October 27. “On election day, you will receive a video on your phone, and you will see me, and I will look and sound as I do now,” he warned a crowd in Tel Aviv on Monday. “But it won’t be me.” “I’ll tell you that, contrary to previous statements, we are going to form a government with the Arab parties,” he predicted. “It will not be me. It will look like me, and it will sound like me, but it won’t be me.” “And by the time we explain that it’s a lie,” he told the Law and Lies conference on disinformation held by the Brandeis Institute and civil society group FakeReporter, “the elections will be over.” In an election campaign where AI-generated political content has become commonplace and convincing deepfakes can be produced with unprecedented ease, Lapid’s scenario no longer seems far-fetched. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Newsletter email address Get it By signing up, you agree to the terms It is also only a single manifestation of a much broader threat facing Israel as it heads into what experts warn could be one of the world’s first major elections to be significantly shaped by artificial intelligence, with chatbots giving political actors unprecedented — and largely invisible — tools to manipulate what voters are led to believe, whether they turn out to vote and, ultimately, whether they accept the results. This will be the first Israeli election in which generative artificial intelligence has become an everyday source of information, with nearly nine in 10 Israelis now using ChatGPT, according to the Israel Internet Association’s annual survey in May. That rapid adoption could leave Israel particularly vulnerable to AI-driven election interference, experts told The Times of Israel, pointing to a potent combination of chatbot ubiquity alongside markedly low digital literacy. Advertisement Also contributing to the dangerous mix is the near-complete absence of regulation or accountability for tech giants behind the platforms increasingly shaping Israelis’ information environment, and alleged efforts by politicians in the governing coalition to undermine public trust in the bodies administering the vote. Former presidential candidate Calin Georgescu raises his hands as he is escorted handcuffed by police officers outside the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, DIICOT, In Bucharest, Romania, September 21, 2026. (AP/Alexandru Dobre) The potential uses of AI to manipulate elections have already been seen abroad. In Romania’s November 2024 presidential election, a little-known, far-right candidate, Călin Georgescu, surged from single digits in opinion polls to an unexpected first-round victory. Romanian intelligence subsequently reported evidence of illegal campaign tactics and suspected Russian interference, which included a massive online influence campaign that used AI-generated content, coordinated bot networks, and the manipulation of TikTok’s algorithms to amplify his popularity artificially. Romania’s Constitutional Court subsequently annulled the election, and Georgescu was subsequently barred from running in the May 2025 rerun. He is now on trial on charges including attempting to undermine the country’s constitutional order following the annulment. Generative AI has taken such manipulation to another level, allowing political actors to produce and distribute vast quantities of tailored propaganda at unprecedented speed and scale. OpenAI itself admitted in June 2025 that it had banned accounts linked to a Philippine marketing firm that used ChatGPT to mass-produce social media comments promoting President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and against Vice President Sara Duterte during the country’s midterm election campaign, in an apparent attempt to manufacture public support. In an election expected to be closely fought, such tools could sway enough of the electorate to significantly affect the outcome. AI’s ability to manipulate perceptions and degrade trust in what is real could also supercharge efforts to undermine confidence in the electoral process, aiding any actor seeking to whip up doubts about the legitimacy of unfavorable results. Israel’s Central Elections Committee has sought to address one aspect of the threat, introducing rules in July requiring election campaigns to clearly label AI-generated or substantially manipulated images, videos, audio recordings and other material that could be mistaken for authentic content. Advertisement Under the regulations, issued by committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg, such material must carry prominent written disclosures or standardized labels identifying it as artificially generated or digitally altered. Failure to comply may constitute a violation of election law. But the rules, which will remain in effect until a year after the October 27 election, address only a narrow slice of the risks posed by AI. They do little to confront the potentially more pervasive influence of chatbots as purveyors of knowledge, the susceptibility of their responses to manipulation, or the broader challenge of protecting voters in an information environment increasingly shaped by systems whose inner workings remain largely opaque. When nobody knows what’s real AI-generated and manipulated campaign material has become a familiar sight ahead of the election, pushed into the public sphere by parties from across the political spectrum. The ease with which AI tools can generate convincing fake footage of real-life people has proven irresistible to politicians, who have repeatedly put out material portraying their rivals in compromising positions. Some of the most contentious examples have come from coalition parties: a video shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew accusations that it purposely invoked Gadi Eisenkot’s son, who was killed in Gaza, while Religious Zionism depicted Democrats lawmakers amid inflammatory imagery. Likud was also ordered to remove a doctored image that falsely placed Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid alongside Arab party leaders at the signing of a nonexistent political agreement. Those images and videos have drawn attention and outrage. But experts say AI’s most consequential uses may be far less visible: shaping the information voters receive from chatbots, targeting individuals with personalized political messaging and, perhaps most significantly, influencing whether particular groups turn out to vote at all. Screenshots from an AI-generated ad shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 21, 2026, against election rival Gadi Eisenkot (Via Facebook) “When researchers examined the 2024 British, French and European elections, they found very few AI-generated disinformation campaigns and no sign that any of them changed a result,” said Shay Hershkovitz, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and an expert on national security and emerging technology. “Most of what circulated reached people who already agreed with it. So as a tool for flipping votes, synthetic video has underperformed the fear around it.” “The campaign that we see in public is creating public opinion. It constantly creates noise in the system, but in practice it doesn’t move people from one side of the political map to the other,” agreed Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and head of its Democracy in the Digital Age Program. That does not mean the flood of AI-generated media disseminated during the campaign is harmless. Advertisement “The more we are inundated with it, the harder it is to differentiate, because you have about two or three seconds when you scroll through your feed to assess whether it’s real or not,” Shwartz Altshuler said. The effect is not necessarily to persuade a voter that a fabricated video is genuine or to win them over. Instead, a constant stream of synthetic images, videos and claims add to the noise of an already deeply divided information environment while steadily weakening the distinction between authentic and manufactured material. “The purpose of this AI slop is not actually to move voters from one side to the other, but to increase gaps in society and to convey the message that it doesn’t matter what is real and what is not,” Shwartz Altshuler said. An AI-generated video posted September 15, 2026 by Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich depicts (left to right) Supreme Court President Isaac Amit, fellow justice Daphne Barak-Erez, and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara being forcibly removed at a protest. (Bezalel Smotrich via X) That creates a phenomenon researchers have termed the “liar’s dividend”: once voters know that almost any convincing image, recording, or video can be artificially generated, authentic material can itself be dismissed as AI. A genuine recording of a politician making a politically damaging statement, for example, could simply be dismissed as an AI fabrication. Conversely, fabricated material can be presented as authentic. The result is an information environment in which evidence itself becomes increasingly easy to contest. Some parties are preparing their own defenses against election disinformation. At Monday’s conference, Lapid said B’Yachad would operate an election-day war room, which he would personally oversee, allowing voters to forward suspicious material to a designated phone number for verification by a team of fact-checkers. The erosion of a shared understanding of reality could have consequences extending well beyond whether voters believe any particular piece of campaign propaganda. If the public increasingly doubts its ability to distinguish authentic evidence from fabrication, experts warned, the same uncertainty can be exploited to undermine confidence in the election itself. That risk is particularly acute in Israel, where the bodies responsible for administering the election and adjudicating disputes over its outcome have already been subject to sustained attacks on their legitimacy by the government and its allies. That uncertainty could become especially consequential if the government loses a close election. After years of attacks by the government and its allies on the judiciary and, more recently, the judge-led Central Elections Committee, claims that the result was fraudulent would reach a public already struggling to distinguish authentic evidence from AI-generated falsehoods. Advertisement Shwartz Altshuler warned that if the result goes against the government, AI could be used to flood that already distrustful environment with purported evidence of fraud or bolster the court’s delegitimization. “There are ministers in the government standing and saying, ‘Don’t listen to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court’s decisions are illegal.’ Who guarantees you that they won’t do the same regarding the election results?” she added. The invisible campaign At the same time that AI is making it increasingly difficult to determine what information can be trusted, Israelis are paradoxically becoming more and more reliant on AI systems themselves to tell them what is true, which is of far greater concern to researchers than AI-generated campaign videos. “The old worry about bots was that they would fool people directly in their social media feeds,” Hershkovitz said. “That is still true, but it is no longer the main danger. It’s not the fake video you see, it’s the AI system you trust.” Unlike during Israel’s last election, millions of voters now routinely turn to generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and others to answer questions, explain events, and offer advice. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaks during a Security Council meeting on artificial intelligence at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, September 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura) When asked about current affairs, chatbots draw on information retrieved from the internet and synthesize it into an answer delivered in an authoritative, ostensibly neutral voice — often without the user having a clear understanding of why particular sources were selected or what information shaped the response. The answers are also liable to contain plainly false information, delivered with the same confidence. Much as search engine optimization is used to game Google’s algorithm in a way that makes certain websites more prominent in search results, generative engine optimization, or GEO, is now being employed to shape the answers chatbots give by influencing what information AI systems rely on. Shwartz Altshuler said political campaigns are already exploring how to use GEO to their advantage, and predicted that it “will decide the elections.” The government is already getting in the GEO game, paying millions to sway American opinions on Israel. According to reports in US media in July, a contract with an American firm