These are hand-field ballots.

An unprecedented year of elections, with 2 billion people going to the polls. And the threat of interference from hostile states or ruthless campaigners has never been greater. Already, some of our political leaders have fallen victim to deep fakes.

The fucking tablet.

It's safe.

And making them has never been easier, as I found when visiting this AI company.

The first thing I need to do is clone your voice. To do that, we're going to use the software itself, and you're just going to tell me what you had for breakfast.

I had two pieces of toast with jam and a cup of coffee, and then I got the train to come and meet you today.

Just seconds of audio, and my voice could be used to say just about anything.

Deep fakes are extremely realistic and have the potential to disrupt our politics and damage our trust in the democratic process.

That's absolutely Completely terrifying.

A few years ago, this was very difficult to achieve.

Completely. A few years ago, it didn't exist. So this is all happening in a very fast pace with the technology getting more and more advanced.

This deep fake led voters in the US primaries to believe President Biden was telling them not to vote. Important that you save your vote for the November election. A former intelligence chief says expensively produced video fakes aren't always convincing.

I'm particularly worried right now about audio because audio deep fakes are spectacularly easy to make, disturbingly easy. I don't think there's no blanket solution. There's no button there that you can just press that will make this problem go away if you're prepared to pay for or pass the right laws.

So how worried should we be?

In my view, there is a risk out there, but we're at a certain point in time where the risk has not yet come close to overwhelming our politics.

But with time running out before the general election, campaigners say the political parties need to come together and agree a set of rules about how to handle AI urgently.

The risk is that you'll have foreign actors, you'll have political parties, you'll have activists, you'll have ordinary people on the street creating content and just stirring the pot of what's true and what's not true. We want them to come together and agree together how they're going to use these tools at the election.

A government spokesperson said they have robust systems in place to ensure the integrity of the election and meet regularly with social media companies to make sure manipulated content is taken down. This election may yet put those to the test. Tomorrowcoin sky news.