We all know something’s not right with our elections. The spread of misinformation, people being targeted with soundbites and emotional triggers that ignore the facts, even the truth, and influence their votes.
The use of technology to produce deep fakes. How can you tell if something is real or not? Can you be sure, for example, that this isn’t the real Judy Garland?
When we go to news sites we question the way a story is being presented, how much spin is at work, what emotions the headline is seeking to inflame. What is real?
These things aren’t going away. The fact that a TikTik video has more reach than a policy, or an informed debate, presents a huge challenge to our democratic system.
So what happens as AI is increasingly applied? What hope will mere humans have of being sufficiently informed to make voting choices beneficial to them, rather than backing those who want their votes, but have little interest in their lives? Because this is just the beginning.
Yesterday I watched an online event hosted by the Guardian’s UK Technology editor, Alex Hearn that asked the question - “Is AI a threat to democracy?”
This year more than two billion people globally will go to the polls, in what Alex referred to as “the first major electoral cycle in the era of widespread generative AI”.
So, what is generative AI?
A definition from Amazon:
“Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) is a type of AI that can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. AI technologies attempt to mimic human intelligence in nontraditional computing tasks like image recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and translation. Generative AI is the next step in artificial intelligence. You can train it to learn human language, programming languages, art, chemistry, biology, or any complex subject matter. It reuses training data to solve new problems.”
Read that last sentence again. It could be describing a human being.
Depending on your point of view this ability of AI to solve new problems is either a brave new world, or it’s time to send a Terminator back from the future.
Either way, buckle in!
Host Alex, was joined by the following speakers:
Katie Harbath, founder and CEO of technology policy firm, Anchor Change. Her substack is Anchor Change with Katie Harbath.
Tom Phillips, a writer and former editor of Full Fact, an independent fact checking organization in the UK.
Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate US/UK.
They began with a game in which three audio clips were played to see if we could pick out which were real, and which were fake.
The first clip was Donald Trump talking about water usage in toilets. The online audience were asked to vote and 59% said they thought it was fake. It was in fact real. I’d guessed fake, he just sounded too coherent.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Nick's Kōrero to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.