Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has traced the appearance of suspected artificial intelligence-generated photographs in its preliminary register of voters to irregularities allegedly introduced by some registration officers who had access to its registration system.
Dr Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, disclosed this on Friday during an appearance on Arise Television, explaining that some registration officers across the country used their login details to introduce questionable records into the database.
He said the commission discovered the irregularities through its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which was used to examine the registration records.
He explained that while some of the photographs were generated using artificial intelligence, others resulted from poor registration procedures.
Bayode said: “We have registration officers on the field. And these registration officers, they have login details to log into the system.
“So what we have found is that some of these registration officers, not all of them now, some of them across the states nationwide, they’ve done different things to bring these irregularities onto the register.
“Some of these pictures are AI-generated. Some of them not AI-generated, but very bad registration. And this thing got into the register by the registration officers and because they have access to register people.
“When the ABIS was run on the system, we saw these people. We know what they did. We know how they did it. But honestly, I don’t know why.”
Bayode added that INEC had identified the records and understood how some of the irregularities occurred, but could not explain why the officers involved had introduced them.