LS Elections 2024: Rs 100 crore invested in AI integration in political campaigns

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections are witnessing a technological leap with AI(artificial intelligence) integration. Political parties and candidates are working with Indian tech agencies from across the country that are enabling them to use AI to offer personalised voter engagement and optimised media tactics. Estimates suggest a significant investment of close to Rs100 crore in AI for this election cycle.

How is AI being used by parties?

The application of AI is multifaceted when it comes to political campaigns. Some of its applications are readily observable while others operate more discreetly. There are three main avenues through which politicians and political parties are leveraging AI today in their campaigns.

Venugopal Ganganna, CEO, Langoor (LS Digital Group Company) explained how AI works for political parties and their candidates.

“Firstly, AI serves as a powerful Research tool for comprehending the behaviour, concerns, and sentiments of the electorate. What once began as simple social listening exercises during the 2019 elections has evolved into sophisticated data-driven analyses of people's attitudes and inclinations,” Ganganna said.

For instance, AI now enables parties to discern the nuanced opinions of individuals in various regions, such as understanding how residents in Hubli perceive a particular political party or how those in Wayanad views a specific political candidate.

“This deeper understanding of voter behaviour, facilitated by AI-powered data science, has become instrumental in shaping campaign strategies and messaging. Despite operating largely behind the scenes, this aspect of AI usage represents a significant investment by political entities, often involving large-scale data analysis across hundreds of locations,” he added.

There of course there is Generative AI that facilitates the personalisation of political communication and messaging. Through advanced algorithms, parties can tailor their outreach efforts to individual voters, addressing them by name, communicating in their preferred language, and delivering customized content, including videos and messages.

“With insights gathered through research, the political parties are optimising GenAI using various AI tools to create hyper personalised campaigns and hyper personalised narratives in focus areas in each region. Further usage of AR, VR, Immersive XR is enabling these hyper personalised communications,” said Ganganna.

Lastly, AI is playing a crucial role in optimising media strategies for the overall campaign; media strategy planning and optimisation is becoming more efficient and effective.

“More importantly, predictable AI is helping to predict engagement and reach.As per our estimates close to anywhere between Rs. 80 crore- Rs. 100 crore has been spent on AI this elections,” he added.

According to numbers collected from agencies, digital avatar generation costs anywhere between Rs1- Rs2 lakh, voice cloning costs close to a lakh and a compact deal that includes content creation to dissemination to an audience size of about 4 lakh people costs anywhere between Rs 32lakh and Rs 47 lakh.

The agencies behind the AI work

A host of Indian tech start ups with AI offerings are working with political parties across the board. While some are helping in the Generative AI piece some offer the entire package of services starting from research to content creation to dissemination. Some of the agencies that have been actively working with political parties and candidates are Avantari Technologies,Polymath Solution- The Indian Deepfaker, Mogi IO, Muonium and others. Most of these agencies have long been using AI to aid political communications across board

Hyderabad based AI content agency Avantari Technologies for instance has been doing this for years.

“We work for parties on a campaign level. We come in at the campaign planning stage and work with the party with a usually innovative idea,” said CEO Bhairav Shankar.

In the past Avanatari has worked with the BJP for the Gujarat 2012 elections where they introduced the hologram, the BMC elections in 2016, where they introduced life-size augmented reality, then in the 2017 where they used poster based augmented reality for Karnataka elections where they worked with the Congress party. In 2019 Avantari Technologies worked with the BJD in Orissa with a door to door AR campaign and the most recent one was the Punjab elections where they worked with the AAP.

Drawing the line between ethical and unethical use of AI

“We believe that artificial intelligence, the line is where we manipulate facts. We believe that the technology is useful for dissemination of information and allowing the information to be more personalised and have a better impact on the vote. However, we do not condone it when the same information is misused by the technology. To us, success is about innovative usage of technology, rather than the unethical shortcut which spoils the field for everyone,” Shankar said.

For Divyendra Singh Jadoun, founder Polymath Solution- The Indian Deepfaker, the line between ethical and unethical use of AI is often blurred.

According to Jadoun, transparency is key.

“All AI-generated content, whether in videos, images, is watermarked. Additionally in the conversational AI agent where people get calls from candidates, the agent clearly state twice that it is AI-powered,”

However sometimes it is not enough.

“Even with all the disclaimers, we recognise that not everyone is familiar with AI. Disclaimers alone might not be enough. Not everyone knows what to make of a ‘AI generated’ tag in a video,” Jadoun said.

Jadoun’s agency doesn’t just partner with political parties to connect with voters, but also to facilitate internal communication with party workers through personalised messages.

The agency is bound by NDA and couldn’t disclose details on specific candidates who've used the agency's services. However, his clientele includes not only those actively campaigning, but also those like Congress' Shakti Pratap Singh Rathore from Ajmer. In this case, the agency is assisting Rathore, a senior party member, to spread awareness messages and encourage voter turnout.