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How AI Threatens Democracy – Part 1 of 2

Sarah KrepsDoug Kriner. Journal of Democracy. October 2023.

About the Authors

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government, adjunct professor of law, and the director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.

Doug Kriner is the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government at Cornell University.

The explosive rise of generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine, but it could also have a disruptive influence on politics. For example, asking a chatbot how to navigate a complicated bureaucracy or to help draft a letter to an elected official could bolster civic engagement. However, that same technology—with its potential to produce disinformation and misinformation at scale—threatens to interfere with democratic representation, undermine democratic accountability, and corrode social and political trust. This essay analyzes the scope of the threat in each of these spheres and discusses potential guardrails for these misuses, including neural networks used to identify generated content, self-regulation by generative-AI platforms, and greater digital literacy on the part of the public and elites alike.

Just a month after its introduction, ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, hit 100-million monthly users, making it the fastest-growing application in history. For context, it took the video-streaming service Netflix, now a household name, three-and-a-half years to reach one-million monthly users. But unlike Netflix, the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and its potential for good or ill sparked considerable debate. Would students be able to use, or rather misuse, the tool for research or writing? Would it put journalists and coders out of business? Would it “hijack democracy,” as one New York Times op-ed put it, by enabling mass, phony inputs to perhaps influence democratic representation? And most fundamentally (and apocalyptically), could advances in artificial intelligence actually pose an existential threat to humanity?

New technologies raise new questions and concerns of different magnitudes and urgency. For example, the fear that generative AI—artificial intelligence capable of producing new content—poses an existential threat is neither plausibly imminent, nor necessarily plausible. Nick Bostrom’s paperclip scenario, in which a machine programmed to optimize paperclips eliminates everything standing in its way of achieving that goal, is not on the verge of becoming reality. Whether children or university students use AI tools as shortcuts is a valuable pedagogical debate, but one that should resolve itself as the applications become more seamlessly integrated into search engines. The employment consequences of generative AI will ultimately be difficult to adjudicate since economies are complex, making it difficult to isolate the net effect of AI-instigated job losses versus industry gains. Yet the potential consequences for democracy are immediate and severe. Generative AI threatens three central pillars of democratic governance: representation, accountability, and, ultimately, the most important currency in a political system—trust.

The most problematic aspect of generative AI is that it hides in plain sight, producing enormous volumes of content that can flood the media landscape, the internet, and political communication with meaningless drivel at best and misinformation at worst. For government officials, this undermines efforts to understand constituent sentiment, threatening the quality of democratic representation. For voters, it threatens efforts to monitor what elected officials do and the results of their actions, eroding democratic accountability. 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.