September 03, 2024
AI’s impact on elections is being overblown
This year, close to half the world’s population has the opportunity to participate in an election. And according to a steady stream of pundits, institutions, academics, and news organizations, there’s a major new threat to the integrity of those elections: artificial intelligence.
The earliest predictions warned that a new AI-powered world was, apparently, propelling us toward a “tech-enabled Armageddon” where “elections get screwed up”, and that “anybody who’s not worried [was] not paying attention.” The internet is full of doom-laden stories proclaiming that AI-generated deepfakes will mislead and influence voters, as well as enabling new forms of personalized and targeted political advertising. Though such claims are concerning, it is critical to look at the evidence. With a substantial number of this year’s elections concluded, it is a good time to ask how accurate these assessments have been so far. The preliminary answer seems to be not very; early alarmist claims about AI and elections appear to have been blown out of proportion.
Far from being dominated by AI-enabled catastrophes, this election “super year” at that point was pretty much like every other election year.
While there will be more elections this year where AI could have an effect, the United States being one likely to attract particular attention, the trend observed thus far is unlikely to change. AI is being used to try to influence electoral processes, but these efforts have not been fruitful. Commenting on the upcoming US election, Meta’s latest Adversarial Threat Report acknowledged that AI was being used to meddle—for example, by Russia-based operations—but that “GenAI-powered tactics provide only incremental productivity and content-generation gains” to such “threat actors.” This echoes comments from the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, who earlier this year stated that “it is striking how little these tools have been used on a systematic basis to really try to subvert and disrupt the elections.”
Read the full article from MIT Technology Review.
More from CNAS
-
Competition, Not Control, is Key to Winning the Global AI Race
The United States, with much of the world’s AI-enabling infrastructure, has positioned itself as the global leader in AI innovation. That might not be the case for much longer...
By Keegan McBride & Matthew Mittelsteadt
-
Regulating AI Is Easier Than You Think
Countries can regulate AI from the ground up by controlling access to highly specialized chips...
By Paul Scharre
-
Sharper: Drones on the Battlefield
From the battlefields of Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, the deployment of drones has become a critical element of modern warfare. Will the explosion of unmanned aerial ...
By Anna Pederson & Molly Campbell
-
How to Revamp Chinese Students’ American Education
The PRC today operates the largest and most sophisticated propaganda apparatus in human history....
By Bill Drexel & Grace Gao