AI has not yet destroyed democracy
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. With almost half the world’s population going to the polls, 2024 was dubbed a super election year, leading many experts to warn of a coming flood of political disinformation. After all, generative artificial intelligence has made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to produce lifelike “deepfake" images and videos.
Never have anti-democratic bad actors had such powerful tools for undermining free and fair elections. Yet while AI-augmented disinformation has clearly proliferated online, it did not have a substantial destabilizing impact on democracy in 2024. The reason is not entirely clear.
Perhaps social-media users have become more discerning, while fact-checkers and digital platforms have done a better job of curtailing the spread of falsehoods—with Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) being an obvious exception. To be sure, in the US presidential election, both sides accused the other of trying to suppress free speech and democracy. According to the leading US fact-checking site Politifact, both campaigns issued misleading or false statements, though the overwhelming majority came from Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, the worst predictions about AI disrupting the democratic process were not borne out. More broadly, the results of the year’s elections around the world were a mixed bag, but liberal and pluralist parties and candidates generally exceeded expectations. In our book Spin Dictators, Daniel Treisman and I point out that most people worldwide (or at least the majority of respondents to the World Values Survey and other similar polls) favour democracy over any alternative model of governance.
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