Summary
A recent Associated Press poll shows that 58% of US adults (Democrats and Republicans) think AI will increase the spread of misinformation in the 2024 presidential election and 83% say it would be bad for presidential candidates to use AI in certain ways during their political campaigns. While the majority of voters expressed distrust in AI tools, some political candidates have already started adopting deepfake ads for their campaigns using AI-generated images and text-to-voice converters to create highly realistic-looking imagery that makes it almost impossible to tell fact from fiction. In addition to influencing public opinion by deploying such deepfakes, AI can be used in other ways to tilt election outcomes. Chatbots can be deployed cheaply and at a massive scale to target millions of individual voters for political persuasion. Deepfakes and other generative AI technologies also threaten the credibility of journalists and the news media, which provides further cause for concern for democracies. While such AI-enabled technology poses a potential risk to the integrity of our elections and threatens to sow deep divisions tearing at the fabric of our society, it also has the potential to improve our democratic institutions. It could be used to increase civic engagement and strengthen our electoral system by widening access and reducing biases inherent in the current system. The challenge is to harness the awesome power of AI while putting in guardrails to protect us all from its worst consequences. To discuss the potential of AI to both strengthen or weaken the political system, we will convene experts ranging from the world of political consulting, social neuroscience, and deepfake technologies.
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