February 15, 2026 | 03:08 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Damar Juniarto still clearly remembers how artificial intelligence, or generative AI, shook Indonesia's electoral landscape two years ago. In a political contest involving more than 205 million voters spread across over 17,000 islands, AI was not merely a technical aid, it was part of political strategy. The founder of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Technology Innovation for Democracy (PIKAT), encountered more than once the use of AI to craft campaign messages and manage candidates' public images.
During his observations throughout the last election, Damar recorded a massive surge of manipulated content, or deepfakes, across the digital sphere. One of the most viral was a video appearing to show Indonesia's seventh President, Joko Widodo, singing a pop song. The clip had already spread widely across social media in April 2023 before it was clarified as fabricated. Seven months later, a video of Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto speaking fluent Arabic garnered more than 1.7 million views on TikTok.
The flood of deepfakes deepened concerns among Damar and a number of activists, researchers, and journalists about the systemic risks of AI. The issue extended beyond disinformation to include algorithmic bias and weak accountability mechanisms. Those shared reflections led to the formation of the Consortium for Democratic and Inclusive Artificial Intelligence (KONDISI), which in May 2019 hadstill been a working group but has since become a civil society organization. "Its formation was relevant to the rise of deepfakes as a product of disinformation," Damar said on Wednesday, January 4, 2026.
According to Damar, AI bias, once regarded as a technical bug when chatbots first gained popularity, was more likely a form of systemic ideological curation or information filtering to align with the interests of its creators. The main risk resembled the impact of AI hallucinations—not only presenting false information, but also hindering decision-making due to a lack of valid data.
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