Our 2024 Election Predictions (in The Information)
Our 2024 Election Predictions (in The Information)
To kick off 2024, we’re bringing you something slightly different. This week, you can find our main story in the Weekend section of The Information with a free gift link for our subscribers below. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled newsletter next week.
5 Predictions About How AI Will (and Won’t) Impact the 2024 U.S. Election
By Alexandra Lindsay and Greg Dale
Want to feel old? It was more than five years ago that director Jordan Peele teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a viral deepfake video of Barack Obama uttering a series of improbable lines, a clip meant to serve as a public service announcement for the dangers of how technology could be used to manipulate public opinion. “It may sound basic, but how we move forward in the age of information is going to be the difference between whether we survive or become some kind of fucked-up dystopia,” Peele as Obama ventriloquist said.
Now, on the precipice of the 2024 election season, that dystopia is just around the corner, courtesy of artificial intelligence—or so say some of the doomsayers. Last week, Fortune magazine quoted Oren Etzioni, an AI expert and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, who imagines a coming flood of AI-fabricated content showing President Joe Biden being rushed to the hospital or depicting a run on banks. “I am completely terrified,” Etzioni said.
And in June, former Google chair Eric Schmidt told CNBC that AI-generated misinformation in this year’s election was one of the biggest short-term dangers from the technology. “The 2024 elections are going to be a mess because social media is not protecting us from false generated AI,” Schmidt said.
We’re not so sure about that. As technologists with years of experience in the political trenches, we have collectively worked on digital strategy for hundreds of campaigns at the federal, state and local level, in addition to national voter mobilization campaigns.
From our perspective, the impact of AI on this election is likely to be more nuanced than many people predict (including the American public: A recent poll showed that 58% of American adults are concerned about the use of AI increasing the spread of false information during the 2024 presidential election).
Don’t get us wrong—there are real reasons to worry about how rapid advances in AI technology will impact elections. We’ve just emerged from several election cycles in which everyone from Russian agents to presidential candidates themselves spread disinformation widely via social networks. In this new era, foreign adversaries, campaign managers and meme lords will increasingly explore and exploit generative AI’s newfound abilities to make an impact on the political scene. But the AI election apocalypse isn’t likely to happen this year.
Here are our predictions for how AI will (and will not) impact the 2024 U.S. election cycle:
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