🇿🇲 EDITOR’S NOTE | AI Crowds Don’t Vote
Campaigns are fought on the ground. Increasingly, they are also being fought on screens.
As election campaign continues, our newsroom is receiving a growing number of photographs from political parties, supporters and ordinary citizens claiming to show campaign rallies across the country. Some capture genuine moments. Others immediately raise editorial questions.
Artificial intelligence has made it remarkably easy to enlarge crowds, duplicate people, remove empty spaces or create scenes that never existed. During an election, such images can create a false sense of momentum, discourage participation or persuade supporters that victory is already assured. Democracy should never be influenced by digitally manufactured realities.
At The People’s Brief, we have deliberately chosen to reject a number of campaign images after our editorial team identified signs of possible AI manipulation or crowd amplification. In several cases, we simply could not verify whether the photographs accurately reflected what happened on the ground. Rather than risk misleading our readers, we chose not to publish them.
This process is ongoing.
As campaigns intensify, we continue receiving photographs every day. Each image is assessed on its own merits. Where authenticity cannot be reasonably established, we will continue exercising editorial restraint, regardless of which political party submitted the material.
We also wish to recognise something that has encouraged us throughout this campaign. Some of the images we have published have prompted immediate feedback from you, our readers, with comments suggesting they appeared artificially generated or digitally enhanced. We welcome those observations. An alert readership is one of the strongest safeguards against misinformation.
Whenever genuine concerns are raised, we review the material again. Journalism is strengthened, not weakened, when readers actively question what they see. Verification is no longer the responsibility of newsrooms alone. It has become a shared responsibility between journalists and an informed public.
This is not an issue confined to one political party. The temptation to exaggerate crowd sizes exists wherever politics is competitive. But no amount of digital editing can substitute for genuine public support. Campaign photographs may shape perceptions, but they do not determine election results.
On polling day, artificial intelligence will not cast a single ballot. Only Zambians will. This remains the only crowd that truly matters.
© The People’s Brief | Editor