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13-04-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ BENGALURE: In early March, a realistic Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, styled as Bhishma Pitamah from the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, was boosted as a political advertisement on Instagram.
With long wavy grey hair, a sun-shaped mark on his forehead and donning body armour, the image depicted what Modi fans see as his role in today’s world: a reincarnation of supreme commander Bhishma who fought against foreign threats.
This Instagram image, created by the right-wing page Hokage Modi Sama and first posted in 2023, was boosted as a political advertisement for two days in March, garnering more than 35,000 impressions.
A media review of Meta Ad Library data of political advertisements in India over the past three months revealed that, between February 27 and March 21, Hokage Modi Sama promoted nearly 50 pieces of AI-generated images of Modi, making it the leading advertiser of AI-generated Modi images on Instagram.
The Meta Ad Library is a public archive that hosts a collection of political advertisements run on its platforms, which include Instagram and Facebook
The common theme across all the images shared by the handle was the valorization of Modi as a Hindu leader. Popular AI images boosted through sponsored posts on Hokage Modi Sama feature Modi as a reincarnation of Bhishma, a suit-wearing son of god, embracing Hindu heritage and the King of Hindu Rashtra settled on his throne, garnering millions of likes and views. (Hindu Rashtra is the contentious ideology of a Hindu-majoritarian rule of India, a move away from its secular founding principle.)
“Through these images, the attempt appears to be to impart a simultaneous sage-like and warrior-like quality to Modi, both of which create the aura of a political leader who is indefatigable, undefeatable, beyond reproach and thus worthy of our unquestioned loyalty,” Amogh Dar Sharma, a lecturer at the University of Oxford who 
studies political communications, told media but the posts by the most prolific online advertiser of Modi’s AI images also show the challenges with enforcing AI-related rules on social media, amid fears of manipulated images being leveraged for propaganda among voters who might not fully understand the extent of alteration that photos and memes could have gone through.
Meta is aware of such use and before a crucial 2024 election year, it announced that starting January, political advertisements on Instagram and Facebook created using artificial intelligence (AI) will have to disclose the use or risk getting banned.
In the 30 days leading up to March 29, Hokage Modi Sama spent 537,799 Indian rupees ($6,500) to boost 363 pieces of political content, including images and videos on its Instagram page, according to Meta Ad Library data. Our analysis shows that nearly 14 percent of all sponsored advertisements, amounting to 50 images, were AI-generated.
All Hokage Modi Sama AI ads were sponsored posts on Instagram and the disclosure of AI’s use was through hashtags such as #aiartwork, #midjourneyart, #midjourneyai and others. Midjourney, which the hashtags appear to refer to, is a popular generative artificial intelligence program but Meta told Al Jazeera that hashtags are not an acceptable disclosure for an advertisement which is digitally created or altered. In cases where advertisers need to disclose that their content is digitally created or altered, Meta will add a label that says “Digitally created” near the “Paid for by” disclaimer, including in the Ad Library. Such labels are currently not present on Hokage Modi Sama AI advertisements.
