Intelligence agencies have warned that AI-generated deepfakes could assume alarming proportions in the coming months as elections in several states approach, with the potential to penetrate the political system on a much larger scale, IANS reported from New Delhi on Wednesday.

Source: IANS

Seven states are scheduled to go to the polls in 2027 — Goa, Gujarat, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Manipur — with assembly elections expected between February and December 2027, the report said. Agencies are keeping a particularly close watch on Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Manipur, where they anticipate a heightened risk of attempts by anti-national elements, HiIndia reported in its account of the same IANS report.

Source: HiIndia (IANS)

7states going to polls in 2027
100-150deepfake videos a day officials warn could be pushed near polls, vs 5-10 normally
3states under particularly close watch: Punjab, UP, Manipur
75%of voters exposed to synthetic media during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, per officials cited

An Intelligence Bureau official said the atmosphere in the country is already charged, pointing to the ongoing anti-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) protests and a heating political atmosphere. 'AI-generated videos of top politicians will be the most preferred choice of these elements. Elements, not just from across the border, but those within the country would look to create such deepfake videos and circulate them widely on social media,' the official said, as quoted by IANS.

Another official said the planned scale is itself the problem: the aim of flooding the system with 100-150 videos a day is to stress fact-checkers, so that some fakes stay in circulation uncontested long enough for the false narrative to set in voters' minds, BizzBuzz reported in its account of the IANS report.

Source: BizzBuzz (IANS)

Officials said the push is aimed mainly at rural voters. In urban areas, they said, at least 30 per cent of people are able to identify such content, but awareness is lower in rural India, where videos are pushed directly to phones through WhatsApp forwards and voice-cloning broadcast campaigns — channels where takedown requests cannot work as they do on X, YouTube or Instagram. Agencies are particularly concerned about Punjab and Manipur, which officials described as volatile, and about rural Uttar Pradesh.

The warning sits alongside repeated Union Government advisories against deepfakes and a SEBI warning against the 'Boss Scam', in which fraudsters impersonate chief executives to trick finance teams into transferring funds, IANS noted. Officials cited survey findings that 22 per cent of Indians encountered political deepfakes in 2024 and that 75 per cent of voters were exposed to synthetic media during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. These are the agencies' assessments and warnings, reported as such; no specific new deepfake incident was announced in the report.

Sources: IANS, HiIndia, BizzBuzz.