Six Ways that AI Could Change Politics

ChatGPT was released just nine months ago, and we are still learning how it will affect our daily lives, our careers, and even our systems of self-governance. 

But when it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images. We’re on the lookout for foreign governments that spread misinformation because we were traumatized by the 2016 US presidential election. And we worry that AI-generated opinions will swamp the political preferences of real people because we’ve seen political “astroturfing”—the use of fake online accounts to give the illusion of support for a policy— grow for decades.

Threats of this sort seem urgent and disturbing because they’re salient. We know what to look for, and we can easily imagine their effects.

The truth is, the future will be much more interesting. And even some of the most stupendous potential impacts of AI on politics won’t be all bad. We can draw some fairly straight lines between the current capabilities of AI tools and real-world outcomes that, by the standards of current public understanding, seem truly startling.

With this in mind, we propose six milestones that will herald a new era of democratic politics driven by AI. All feel achievable—perhaps not with today’s technology and levels of AI adoption, but very possibly in the near future.