The booming business of AI war rooms during India’s elections

Divyendra Singh Jadoun has a catalog of videos, audio, and images on his computer that he promptly presents each time someone asks him about his work. In one of the videos, an Indian politician can be seen talking in multiple Indian languages about the various projects undertaken by his government. In an audio recording, a political party representative can be heard calling a voter to inquire about the problems they face in their locality and seeking suggestions to address them.

Some of these visuals and audio clips are so realistic that a layperson would never guess they — along with the other content in Jadaoun’s catalog — have been created using artificial intelligence.

Jadoun is the founder of Polymath Solution, a synthetic media company that started creating AI content for politicians in November last year. In just six months, the nine-member company — run out of an office in the small western Indian town of Pushkar — has worked on election campaigns for several major political parties, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the leading opposition party Indian National Congress.

With his content catalog, Jadoun has secured half a dozen political campaigning deals. The company expects to generate $241,000 in revenue during the six-week-long elections.

It’s not a tough target.

AI content makers like Polymath are sought after by national and regional politicians in India amid what is being touted as the biggest election in the world. Four AI content agencies told Rest of World they are seeing more demand than they can manage, with political parties in the country projected to spend over $50 million on AI-generated campaign material this year. Even as they look to maximize their earnings, however, the AI content companies are filtering out “unethical” requests for fake content that could propagate misinformation.

“I can’t work with 10 parties parallelly; I don’t have the bandwidth for that,” Senthil Nayagam, founder of AI media tech firm Muonium, based in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, told Rest of World. His company works only with political parties it can “trust and can vouch for,” he said.

India’s general elections, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is up for a third term, are being held in seven phases. The first phase concluded on April 19, and the last phase is scheduled for June 1.

Nayagam started taking on political assignments in January. His first prominent project was with Tamil Nadu’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party. Nayagam’s team created an AI video of the party’s deceased iconic leader, M Karunanidhi, endorsing the state administration.

Some of the most popular AI content during election campaigning this year includes personalized videos that can be circulated on WhatsApp, 3D holograms that can be viewed by scanning a QR code, and deepfake videos of politicians that are posted on social media platforms.

Avantari Technologies, an AI content agency based in the southern city of Hyderabad, receives requests for politicians’ deepfake videos on a near-daily basis. CEO Bhairav Shankar told Rest of World the company declines such requests. Avantari was among the first to use digital tools in election campaigns. In 2012, during the Gujarat state elections, the company developed 3D holograms for then-Chief Minister Modi.

“We work in the political space and [to] successfully work in the political space, it’s very important to maintain our reputation,” Shankar said. Without disclosing a name, he said the company has chosen to focus solely on one political party to maintain project integrity. “We would not want to besmirch it by … doing anything that is unethical. We’re happy to do everything that we can to make our party win, but not cross the line.”

Political parties are willing to invest millions in a technology-driven campaign if it achieves their objectives, Shankar said. If a party is trying to run a campaign which could “touch almost every person in [their] state,” even a fee of $10 million “becomes a very average figure” to pay, he said.

But despite AI companies like Avantari turning down requests for political deepfakes, several such videos have circulated on the Indian internet this election season. Some recent viral deepfakes showed prominent Bollywood celebrities Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh criticizing Modi.

Just three months on, Nayagam is so swamped with contracts for political AI content that he has hired external studios, photographers, sound engineers, and editors to keep up with deadlines.

“We have hired people who have previously worked in [the film] industry in VFX [or] CGI … for high-quality output and fast delivery,” said Nayagam, who has worked with several regional parties. If a client’s project requires a larger workforce, he brings in people with experience in audio, video, and visual effects.

Muonium is working on campaigns for close to 10 politicians, and has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, Nayagam said. He declined to disclose the exact numbers. “Each candidate is willing to spend over a million rupees [$12,000] on using AI technology for their election campaigning,” he said. The company had charged over $12,000 for the Karunanidhi video.

Companies told Rest of World they often encounter a conflict of interest — when two opposing parties approach them at once.

If a deal is finalized, an AI agency usually doesn’t work with opposition parties in the same state or area, Jadoun said. “But nobody has ever asked us also if you work with opposition candidates.”

There’s no upper limit to what an agency can charge for its services, Sagar Vishnoi, a Delhi-based political strategist, told Rest of World.

“Individual party expenditures vary, with major parties potentially earmarking over a million dollars for AI initiatives,” he said. “But an average Lok Sabha [the lower house of Indian Parliament] candidate might allocate approximately $80,000 to $90,000, depending on financial capability and recognition of the effectiveness of innovative campaign strategies.”

Polymath has a tiered pricing structure based on project complexity. When it comes to personalized video messaging, the company charges 60,000 rupees ($720) for voice cloning, 1 lakh rupees ($1,200) for digital avatar creation, and up to 2 lakh rupees ($2,400) for WhatsApp integration. Meanwhile, Avantari charges 10 lakh rupees ($12,000) for voice cloning, and up to 25 rupees (30 cents) per video message. “For WhatsApp integration, we make a separate application and run a call center for bulk messaging. This costs 30 rupees [36 cents] per WhatsApp message,” Shankar said.

Payments are usually made in three installments. “After signing the NDA, we receive the first installment of [30%],” Varun Bisaria, who manages clients for Polymath, told Rest of World. The other two installments are paid after the content is finalized and the project completed.

Before finalizing a deal, all the four AI agencies make their clients sign nondisclosure agreements, outlining ethical guidelines and the details, duration, and pricing of the content created. The agreement includes the payment schedule for the project.

Once Polymath has received data from the client, it starts training AI for voice modulation, pronunciation of names in different languages and dialects, and lip-syncing, Jadoun said. The videos are then tailored to the client’s language preference and distributed over WhatsApp using algorithms to personalize the outreach to each recipient.

Jadoun has begun outsourcing work to freelance developers he finds on Instagram and LinkedIn. “Our workload is increasing, so we’ve started expanding our in-house team as well,” he said.

At Avantari, the company’s AI engineers develop and deploy the software. The most important members in the team, according to Shankar, are the quality controllers, who check the quality of the content before it reaches voters.

The demand for AI material is higher in some states than others, depending on the local politicians’ campaign budgets, Diggaj Mogra, director of Jarvis Consulting, a Mumbai-based political consulting firm, told Rest of World. Mogra is working with Modi’s BJP during this election.

Election campaign spending in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka is “hefty,” which means there is a higher investment in tech-related tools, according to Mogra. In contrast, he said, the budgets are much smaller in Bihar.

“While only a handful of parties embrace technology fully,” some are willing to invest up to 20% of their total campaign budget on communication tools like WhatsApp and an AI-enabled interactive voice response system, he said.

As parties pump more money into AI campaign materials, there are risks that the technology might be misused, Mogra said. He said he knows of some politicians who are planning to launch defamatory attacks using AI-generated content. Deepfake experts have previously told Rest of World that AI can also be used as cover when politicians want to distance themselves from unflattering content.

AI is still in its infancy, according to Mogra. It does not have the same impact as on-the-ground campaigning because it currently plays only “a supporting part,” he said. “In the next elections of 2029, AI will be a big thing, but right now, it is only in the experimental phase.” 

source : restofworld