Your Undivided Attention

How Will AI Affect the 2024 Elections? with Renee DiResta and Carl Miller

Dec 21, 2023

Renee DiResta and Carl Miller discuss the risks AI poses to elections. They explore deep fakes, combating hate speech and misinformation, accessing data for analysis, and the need for transparency from platforms. Implementing digital morality blockouts and circuit breakers is suggested to reduce negative engagement.

47:15

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Episode guests

Renee DiResta

Carl Miller

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Quick takeaways

AI's impact on elections and democracies can be exacerbated by social media and generative AI dynamics.

Understanding covert influence operations is crucial in countering the manipulation of information and technology.

AI-powered fake friendships pose a threat to trust in elections, creating parallel epistemic worlds and perpetuating apathy and distrust.

Deep dives

The Impact of AI on Our Lives and Democracies

AI's impact on our lives and democracies, as exemplified by social media, is discussed. The podcast highlights the upcoming global experiment of generative AI in the 2024 elections, which could exacerbate the harms of social media. The experts emphasize the need to understand the changes in social media platforms, the proliferation of new entrants, increased polarization, and the layering of generative AI dynamics. They highlight the importance of countering sustained and covert influence operations by state bureaucracies, for-profit actors, and political campaigns. The potential risk of AI-generated deep fakes is mentioned, although it is recognized that influence primarily works through social connections and personal relationships.

The Conceptual Development of Information Warfare and Influence Operations

01:13

Regulating Digital Engagement for Sensitive Periods

01:32

Limitations of Watermarking for Addressing Malicious Deployment of AI-Generated Content

01:16

Influence Operations and Activists' Engagement

01:25

Introduction

2min

The Changing Threat Model and Information Warfare

7min

Deep Fakes and Their Influence on Elections

16min

Combatting Hate Speech and Misinformation on Social Media Platforms

2min

Challenges and Concerns in Accessing and Analyzing Data

17min

Addressing the Precarity and Demanding Transparency from Platforms

2min

Implementing Digital Morality Blockouts and Circuit Breakers to Reduce Engagement

2min

2024 will be the biggest election year in world history. Forty countries will hold national elections, with over two billion voters heading to the polls. In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, two experts give us a situation report on how AI will increase the risks to our elections and our democracies.

Correction: Tristan says two billion people from 70 countries will be undergoing democratic elections in 2024. The number expands to 70 when non-national elections are factored in.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

White House AI Executive Order Takes On Complexity of Content Integrity Issues
Renee DiResta’s piece in Tech Policy Press about content integrity within President Biden’s AI executive order

The Stanford Internet Observatory
A cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media

Demos

Britain’s leading cross-party think tank

Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality by Renee DiResta

Pre-order Renee’s upcoming book that’s landing on shelves June 11, 2024

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Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_