Merging AI Incidents Research with Political Misinformation Research: Introducing the Political Deepfakes Incidents Database

This article presents the Political Deepfakes Incidents Database (PDID), a collection of politically-salient deepfakes, encompassing synthetically-created videos, images, and less-sophisticated 'cheapfakes.' The project is driven by the rise of generative AI in politics, ongoing policy efforts to address harms, and the need to connect AI incidents and political communication research. The database contains political deepfake content, metadata, and researcher-coded descriptors drawn from political science, public policy, communication, and misinformation studies. It aims to help reveal the prevalence, trends, and impact of political deepfakes, such as those featuring major political figures or events. The PDID can benefit policymakers, researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, and the public by providing insights into deepfake usage, aiding in regulation, enabling in-depth analyses, supporting factchecking and trust-building efforts, and raising awareness of political deepfakes. It is suitable for research and application on media effects, political discourse, AI ethics, technology governance, media literacy, and countermeasures. Background and Motivation Recent Advances and Political Implications Deepfake generation capabilities have evolved significantly in recent years, with the technology now capable of creating hyper-realistic content with minimal expertise [3]. This includes not only synthetic text, but also audio, images, and videos, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to reliably distinguish between real and fake content [12, 22] . While deepfakes and other synthetic media, including simpler 'cheapfakes,' serve diverse purposes from entertainment and education to fraud, a class of particularly concerning uses are politically-oriented deepfakes. Recent instances include the use of deepfakes to critique political figures such as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Nancy Pelosi, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 1 Deepfakes have been leveraged to influence voter turnout [6], accuse politicians of sexual scandals [7] , and even influence geopolitical events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine [28] .