Suzanne Nossel writes:

Midway through a year in which more than 2 billion voters in at least 64 counties are going to the polls, pioneers of artificial intelligence are breathing a sigh of relief and arguing that the worst fears over the potentially corrosive influence of AI on democracies seem to have been overblown. While platforms have removed scores of AI-distorted videos of politicians lying or making fools of themselves, the impact on voters and tallies has seemed minimal.

But in the midst of the first-ever round of AI-influenced elections globally, it’s important to guard against a false sense of security. The last two decades have witnessed drastic and irreversible political changes wrought by the internet and social media, most of which were unforeseen and took years or decades to fully manifest. As the world assesses AI’s effects on democracy, we need to settle in for the long haul, looking well beyond the most obvious and tangible near-term threats to elections.

Going into this avalanche of elections, tech platforms, politicians, and regulators had dire forecasts about how AI would enable foreign interference and supply garden-variety fraudsters with deepfakes, the highly realistic videos that are doctored or depict events that never took place. In February, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others pledged “reasonable precautions” to label manipulated content and share information about it.

Just two months later, Meta President Nick Clegg was already drawing conclusions. He remarked after balloting in Taiwan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that “it is striking how little these tools have been used on a systematic basis to really try to subvert and disrupt the elections.” In June, Microsoft President Brad Smith similarly declared that while it was too soon to “declare victory,” Russian interference was more focused on the Olympics than the elections. Last month, tech journalist Louis Anslow opined about AI that “the death of democracy and truth is starting to seem greatly exaggerated,” calling it an “awkward anti-climax.”

Some of these tidy conclusions ring familiar. In 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, Pew Research concluded in a study that fears that the internet “might hurt healthy democratic deliberation are not borne out by online behavior.” Users were “not insulating themselves in information echo chambers” and the internet was judged to offer “heartening” potential for “stemming” polarization. In 2012, there were cheery reports that Facebook’s “I voted” button had driven a meaningful uptick in voter participation.

Of course, those early measures of the impact of the internet and social media on democracy proved laughably rosy. [Continue reading…]