Multiple polls have found that concerns about the influence of artificial intelligence programs on elections has grown among voters over the past year, ahead of the 2024 presidential primaries.
A UChicago Harris/AP-NORC Poll released last month found that most adults who identify as either Republican or Democrat are concerned that the use of AI is "increasing the spread of false information" as the 2024 general election nears.
Another survey from Morning Consult and Axios found that most Americans think AI-spread misinformation will influence who wins the 2024 presidential election.
"2024 will be an AI election, much the way that 2016 or 2020 was a social media election," Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, the interim dean at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy who worked on the UChicago poll, told The Hill. "We will all be learning as a society about the ways in which this is changing our politics."
"They are a very powerful tool for doing things like making fake videos, fake pictures, et cetera, that look extremely convincing and are extremely difficult to distinguish from reality — and that is going to be likely to be a tool in political campaigns, and already has been," he added.
Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy advocate for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog group, told the Hill there's a risk of overstating the possibilities of AI when it comes to the dissemination of misinformation.
"Certainly, the technology could be used in creative and novel ways, but what underlies those applications are all threats like disinformation campaigns or cyberattacks that we've seen before," Schneidman said. "We should be focusing on mitigation strategies that we know that are responsive to those threats that are amplified, as opposed to spending too much time trying to anticipate every use case of the technology."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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