The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has revealed that some of its registration officers across Nigeria were responsible for irregularities involving AI-generated pictures in the voter register.
INEC’s Director of ICT, Lawrence Bayode, disclosed this during an interview with ARISE TV on Friday. He explained that some registration officers used their access to the system to introduce fake and questionable pictures into the register.
“I can tell you how AI-generated photos found their way into the register, “Mr Bayode said. “Number one, you know, we have registration officers on the field, and these registration officers have login details to log into the system. So what we have found out 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 into the register.”
Bayode added that the commission had started reviewing the register to remove the affected entries.
“So, we’re cleaning up; we’re seeing a lot of things, different people doing different things, some of them similar. Some of these pictures are AI-generated, some of them not AI-generated, but very bad registration. This thing got into the register by the registration officers, and because they have access to register people,” Mr Bayode said.
The discovery of AI-generated pictures and duplicate entries has raised public concerns about the accuracy of the voter register ahead of next year’s general elections.
INEC had earlier admitted the problems and promised an investigation following concerns over suspected AI-generated pictures in its preliminary voter register published online earlier this month.
