Artificial intelligence has a gun to democracy's head

We've been living in what has been called a "post-truth" world for some time now. There doesn't seem to be a shared set of facts that everyone operates on anymore. Artificial intelligence threatens to make an already bad situation significantly worse, and something needs to be done soon before things spiral out of control.

AI is becoming more advanced with each passing week, and it's being utilized for more and more purposes as it evolves. It's a therapist. It's an essayist. It's an artist. It's not any of these things, and yet it's becoming all of them. The -ist that I worry about the most when it comes to AI is its increasing role as a skilled propagandist.

I know some people are already saying to themselves, "AI is shit. It can't do any of these things at all. This is absurd." Sure, AI often does not live up to the hype, but it is rapidly developing, and the things we made fun of it for being unable to do at this point in time will likely eventually become things it can do with relative ease—and quite possibly without detection.

As things stand, I'm already seeing AI warp people's view of the world around them. Even with its many flaws, it's fooling people and changing their perspective. We're seeing AI-generated videos flooding social media during crises, AI-generated fake news websites, deepfakes of politicians and more. It's impossible to avoid, and people are often unknowingly being influenced by it.

There are people in my life who don't know much about the work I do, and occasionally a conversation will get political. I try to always be humble during these conversations and attempt to just understand where they're coming from and maybe help push them in the right direction if they're confused about something or repeating false claims. Lately, I've been hearing quite a bit of disinformation repeated back to me from these people I encounter now and then, and I've been able to determine that some of it is coming from AI-generated content.

If this is already happening, then it is going to get worse. More people will believe things that are patently untrue, and these false beliefs will have a greater impact on our elections and our democratic system.

Sometimes this kind of AI fakery can be fun—we all remember the pope in a puffer jacket—but it won't be a rollicking joke when generative AI is behind the kind of content that might swing an election in an authoritarian's favor. It won't be a cause for laughter when it's used to justify death and destruction.

So what can be done? And where are our politicians on this issue at this critical juncture? As things tend to go with new technological problems, there are no silver bullets that will make everything better. As things almost always seem to go in the political world, our politicians largely don't understand the problem and are not motivated to fix it.