Essays in the Category "Democracy"
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How Artificial Intelligence Can Aid Democracy
There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated argument. People might fall down political rabbit holes, taken in by superficially convincing bullshit, or obsessed by folies à deux relationships with machine personalities that don’t really exist.
These risks may be the fallout of a world where businesses deploy poorly tested A.I. systems in a battle for market share, each hoping to establish a monopoly.
But dystopia isn’t the only possible future. A.I. could advance the public good, not private profit, and bolster democracy instead of undermining it. That would require an A.I. not under the control of a large tech monopoly, but rather developed by government and available to all citizens. This public option is within reach if we want it…
We Don’t Need to Reinvent Our Democracy to Save It from AI
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Our essay argued that the much heralded launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, a system that can generate text realistic enough to appear to be written by a human, poses significant threats to democratic processes. The ability to produce high quality political messaging quickly and at scale, if combined with AI-assisted capabilities to strategically target those messages to policymakers and the public, could become a powerful accelerant of an already sprawling and poorly constrained force in modern democratic life: lobbying…
How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
Launched just weeks ago, ChatGPT is already threatening to upend how we draft everyday communications like emails, college essays and myriad other forms of writing.
Created by the company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can automatically respond to written prompts in a manner that is sometimes eerily close to human.
But for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes—not through voting, but through lobbying…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.