Xóchitl Gálvez on July 4 in Mexico City.HENRY ROMERO (Portal)
Supporters of Senator of the National Action Party (PAN) Xóchitl Gálvez have mobilized on the networks in recent days to respond to criticism from Morena, the political formation of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. To do this, they took the image and the voice of the senator and shaped them with the help of artificial intelligence. The result is a false reaction by Galvez to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the capital’s former Prime Minister Claudia Sheinbaum. Experts interviewed by this newspaper reflect on the challenges and opportunities of using technology in the field of political communication.
Gálvez is one of the candidates to lead the Va por México alliance – made up of the PRI, PAN and PRD – ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. In one of the videos, the senator’s photo gestures and comments: “He tells me, Claudia.” [Sheinbaum] that not every woman can be President, and she is right. If you don’t have something, if you need help, if you pretend you’re not, you can’t. If you don’t believe, if you don’t think about winning, you can’t do it without thinking about the competition […]“. In the background, epic music underscores the speech of the edited Gálvez. The innocuous announcement being circulated by its followers — and which can be edited with easily accessible applications — reopens the debate about the future of its utilities.
Felipe López, a communications researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), believes artificial intelligence will be another tool in the arsenal of campaign and propaganda teams. But he believes that personal contact is and will remain important in Mexico: “He really pushed López Obrador to firstly consolidate a movement the size of Morena; and second, to win the 2018 election so overwhelmingly.” The incumbent president garnered around 30 million votes in the 2018 election, campaigning far removed from social media and the internet.
Artificial intelligence, a double advantage
The technology director (CTO) of the digital strategy agency Realithink, Iván Priego, believes that the success of a hypothetical professional campaign of these characteristics would depend “on the purpose of the action”. “If that promoted it as a way of communicating with its constituents and gave it a purpose, like talking about issues of interest to a certain demographic, it would be interesting.” But I don’t think it was positive because voters doubt it would know who is Xóchitl and who is not [Gálvez]. She stops being human and on a psychological level, human recognition is lost,” she explains.
Priego reiterates that agencies use information to get to know the public better: tastes, reactions, feedback… “It’s a pretty broad topic. We who are dedicated to marketing see more powerful things in its use. One of them is that it can help us create predictive sentiment analysis. And I think it’s a starting point in political marketing, beyond meat integration,” he muses. The CTO says that this positive trait could also have negative benefits. “It can go both ways: you can wage a dirty war both on the part of artificial intelligence to achieve decontextualization of messages and to achieve duplication of a human and the image of the message.” And he concludes : “The great challenge of artificial intelligence technology in all its senses is human ethics, and I believe that it will really determine the future.”
The great challenge of artificial intelligence is human ethics
Iván Priego, Technology Director at Realithink
Gálvez, a lack of language?
The Senator’s image gestures again, this time to reply to López Obrador. “Now the President says, very macho, he doesn’t believe me. There will always be someone who doesn’t believe you, who doubts your origins, your history and your dreams. There will always be someone who doubts your abilities, your strength and your ideals […]“. The pattern in this second video is the same: Gálvez’s image shifts into a fusion of landscapes and animated characters, and speech and music create the epic.
The PAN senator has garnered a heavy media presence in recent weeks, partly due to her reactions to criticism and the references Morena has made. For days, Gálvez began to monopolize the attention López Obrador’s party had gained through the advances of its candidates. The UNAM investigator realizes that despite this attention, the senator remains puzzled. “I think that the problem of Xóchitl [Gálvez] it is closer to the construction of the message than to the technology used to spread it. So far it has strengthened a semantic axis, essentially aimed at those who hate López Obrador, of whom there are many and who do not need persuasion. But he hasn’t done anything to attract those who support him, who are more and maybe don’t see Marcelo with good eyes, for example. [Ebrard] or to Adam Augustus [López]and perhaps if they could vote for a woman other than Claudia [Sheinbaum]’ explains Lopez.
The senator’s supporters took her character into the world of artificial intelligence, but she didn’t need it to monopolize media attention. From the gap that the like-minded electorate opens, the question arises of how it could be used and what problems a new tool of political communication might pose.
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