Ami Fields-Meyer and Janet Haven
As the United States nears its consequential November election, concerns about the impacts of artificial intelligence on the country’s electoral integrity are front and center. Voters are receiving deceptive phone calls mimicking candidates’ voices, and campaigns are using AI images in their ads. Many fear that highly targeted messaging could lead to suppressed voter turnout or false information about polling stations. These are legitimate concerns that public officials are working overtime to confront.
But free and fair elections, the building blocks of democratic representation, are only one dimension of democracy. Today, policymakers must also recognize an equally fundamental threat that advanced technologies pose to a free and open society: the suppression of civil rights and individual opportunity at the hands of opaque and unaccountable AI systems. Ungoverned, AI undermines democratic practice, norms, and the rule of law—fundamental commitments that underpin a robust liberal democracy—and opens pathways toward a new type of illiberalism. To reverse this drift, we must reverse the currents powering it.
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