AI is changing every aspect of democratic politics, translating speeches in real time to fooling us all en masse, while tech companies hold profitable positions in democracies, negatively influencing our abilities to sustain self-rule very soon!
When computers get involved in any process, that process changes. Scalable automation, for example, can transform political advertising from one-size-fits-all into personalized marketing — candidates telling each of us what they think we want to hear or vote. Such new dependencies can also lead to brittleness: Exploiting gains from automation can mean dropping human oversight, and chaos results when critical computer systems go down. Politics is adversarial. Any time AI is used by one candidate or party, it invites hacking by those associated with their opponents, perhaps to modify their behavior, eavesdrop on their output, or to simply shut them down. Disinformation weaponized on social media will be increasingly targeted toward machines, too.
Generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine, and now unveils its disruptive influence on politics. Recent steps in deep / reinforcement learning – application of large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models to the generation of text, image, video, or audio content lit public imaginary of AI data vampires.
Some areas of AI impact: at the individual level, AI impacts the conditions of self-rule and people’s opportunities to exercise it; at the group level, AI impacts equality of rights among different groups of people in society; at the institutional level, AI impacts the perception of elections as a fair and open machines for channeling and managing political conflict; and at the systems level, AI impacts competition between democratic and autocratic systems of government.
AI is different from traditional computer systems in that it tries to encode common sense and judgment that goes beyond simple rules; yet humans have no single ethical system, or even a single definition of fairness. We will see AI systems optimized for different parties and ideologies; for one faction not to trust the AIs of a rival faction; for everyone to have a healthy suspicion of corporate for-profit AI systems with hidden biases. Technological shifts have effects on politics and political competition by asymmetrically favoring actors, factions, or groups depending on their alignment or misalignment with the affordances emerging from technology of the day.
AI trends are spreading to democracies around the world, will probably accelerate, for years to come. Everyone, especially AI skeptics and those concerned about its potential to exacerbate bias and discrimination, should recognize that AI is coming for every aspect of democracy. The transformations won’t come from the top down; they will come from the bottom up. Politicians and campaigns will start using AI tools when they are useful. So will lawyers, and political advocacy groups. Judges will use AI to help draft their decisions because it will save time. News organizations will use AI because it will justify budget cuts. Bureaucracies and regulators will add AI to their already algorithmic systems for determining all sorts of benefits and penalties.
A reasonable cognitive prophylactic measure in such a media environment would be to believe nothing, a nihilism that is at odds with vibrant democracy and corrosive to social trust. As objective reality recedes even further from the media discourse, those voters who do not tune out altogether will likely begin to rely even more heavily on other heuristics, such as partisanship, which will only further exacerbate polarization and stress on democratic institutions. As most citizens lack even basic political knowledge, and levels of policy-specific knowledge are likely lower still while the signals sent by the balance of electronic communications about pressing policy issues may be severely misleading.
Trust in media is already low, and the proliferation of tools that can generate inauthentic content will erode that trust even more. This, in turn, could further undermine perilously low levels of trust in government. Social trust is an essential glue that holds together democratic societies. It fuels civic engagement and political participation, bolsters confidence in political institutions, and promotes respect for democratic values, an important bulwark against democratic backsliding and authoritarianism.
Are EVM admins wary of possible risks? AI’s capacity to locate and synthesize vast amounts of public data can generate phishing attacks tailored to election officials whose contact information exists in public domain. If these officials have privileged access to sensitive voter and government data, the integrity of elections they oversee may be jeopardized if their personal information and admin duties are exploited by malware or ransomware.
Generative AI threatens three central pillars of democratic governance: representation, accountability, and, ultimately, the most important currency in a political system – trust. AI also used by media providers to automatically generate text, image, or video content and more.. whether this results in a better democracy, or a more just world, remains to be seen. Keep watching how those in power uses these tools, and also how they empower the currently powerless. Those of us who are constituents of democracies should advocate tirelessly to ensure that we use AI systems to better democratize democracy, and not to further its worst tendencies.
Internet remains one big confirmation-bias machine. Information that seems plausible because it comports with a person’s political views may be less likely to drive that bhakt to check the veracity of a story. In a world of easily generated fake content, many people may have to walk a fine line between political nihilism – that is, not believing anything or anyone other than their fellow partisans—and healthy skepticism. Giving up on objective fact, or at least the ability to discern it from the news, would shred the trust on which democratic society must rest. But we are no longer living in a world where “seeing is believing.” Individuals should adopt a “trust but verify” approach to media consumption, reading and watching but exercising discipline in terms of establishing the material’s credibility.
Ref: wired.com / journalofdemocracy.org / SAGE Publications / Wikipedia / Brookings Institution