Government office seekers and their supporters have discovered AI. Is that a good or bad thing?
Artificial intelligence is transforming virtually all aspects of social and business life. For better or worse, this includes political campaigns and elections.
These are not the first elections where AI has been used, but they are the first with low-cost AI tools widely available, introducing a new element of uncertainty for campaigns and voters, observes Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, via email.
AI is changing campaigns at a meteoric rate by providing politicians and their teams with advanced tools to shape public opinion, notes Sez Harmon, an AI policy analyst at the Responsible AI Institute. “Campaigns are using generative AI to personalize voter outreach, tailor speeches and marketing materials, create deepfakes of political opponents, and amplify election narratives.” In an online interview, she states that AI tools can also be used for predictive analysis to assess where candidates should focus their advertising and fundraising efforts on campaign tours to sway voters in key jurisdictions.
At a time when trust in the election process is rapidly diminishing, tools that blur the lines between reality and misinformation run the risk of eroding voter confidence even more, Skeet warns. “Voters need to bring an extra level of vigilance to their media and advertising consumption during this election cycle and build basic information literacy skills that will help them identify where political information is coming from, how it’s vetted, edited and distributed, who’s paying for it, and what tools are being used to create it.”
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Source: https://www.informationweek.com/machine-learning-ai/how-ai-is-changing-political-campaigns
