Generative AI may change elections this year — Indonesia shows how
JAKARTA — Fika Juliana Putri, a 19-year-old shopkeeper in East Jakarta, plans to vote in Indonesia’s presidential election next week for a once-feared former special forces commander.
JAKARTA — Fika Juliana Putri, a 19-year-old shopkeeper in East Jakarta, plans to vote in Indonesia’s presidential election next week for a once-feared former special forces commander. She likes him, she says, because he’s cuddly.
A doe-eyed cartoon version of Gen. Prabowo Subianto — produced using generative AI — is emblazoned on billboards across Indonesia. It’s reproduced on sweatshirts and stickers, and featured prominently on #Prabowo-tagged posts that have some 19 billion views on TikTok.
Prabowo is Indonesia’s defence minister. But on social media, his chubby-cheeked AI avatar makes Korean-style finger hearts and cradles his beloved cat, Bobby, to the delight of Gen Z voters. About half of Indonesia’s 205 million voters are under 40.
The general elections on Feb. 14 in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, offer a glimpse of how generative AI may transform large-scale political campaigning, experts say.
The AI-generated cartoon has been central to the electoral rebranding of Prabowo, who is far ahead in polls. Instead of portraying himself as a fiery nationalist, as he did in two prior failed presidential bids, the 72-year-old’s new catchphrase is “gemoy” — which is Indonesian slang for cute and cuddly.
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