Democracy In Era Of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has become the subject of inquiry and critical reflection not only of the scientists and techno-governance experts but also of political scientists and foreign policy strategists. Henry A Kissinger, former US secretary of state and foreign policy strategist, who passed away a few months ago, has co-authored a book titled "The Age of AI (Artificial Intelligence)” in which he has dealt with repercussions of AI in political life of humanity. At the age of 98, Henry Kissinger was persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic dealing with AI at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. Kissinger, Schmidt teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a new book, "The Age of AI", about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of AI.  The authors presage emphatically that AI augurs a revolution in human affairs. 

According to the authors of the book, AI processes have become powerful and seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs. The AI processes are so unpredictable that without some forethought and management, epoch-making transformations they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction. The authors make prophetic remarks in their much vaunted work “Now we are entering an era in which AI- a human creation - is increasingly entrusted with tasks that previously would have been performed, or attempted, by human minds. As AI executes these tasks producing results approximating and sometimes surpassing those of human intelligence, it challenges a defining attribute of what it means to be human.”

Human conditions

In the same vein, Journal of Democracy - a publication of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US think tank organisation close to the State Department - recently carried almost half a dozen well-researched articles written by world’s leading experts shedding light on the potential of AI to improve human conditions while also recognising the risks it poses for democracy and development, among others. This short piece draws on the key observations from the articles authored  by Tom Davidson, Sarah Kreps and Doug Kriner in the  Journal of Democracy focused on the wider ramifications of the AI for institutions of democracy and representation.

Needless to say, AI has catapulted into the public consciousness with the advent of large language models, such as Chat GPT, that are trained on vast amounts of data to understand text and generate original content. The spotlight on the incredible capabilities of Chat GPT and other AI systems, and the challenges that they are posing in workplaces and classrooms, is raising interest in how to govern and regulate AI. AI experts worry that humans could lose control to runaway AI systems sometime in the next five to twenty years. This is not the first time that humanity has needed to simultaneously address serious current and future risks posed by a single technology. Other innovations —I n energy, medicine, and agriculture — had presented similar challenges and risks during the previous eras. 

Democracy, as Robert Dahl wrote in 1972, requires “the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens.” For elected officials to be responsive to the preferences of their constituents, they must first be able to discern those preferences. Public-opinion polls afford elected officials window into their constituents’ preferences. But most citizens lack basic political knowledge, and levels of policy-specific knowledge are likely lower still. In an era of generative AI, however, the signals sent by the balance of electronic communications about pressing policy issues may be severely misleading. According to the authors, technological advances now allow malicious actors to generate false “constituent sentiment” at scale by effortlessly creating unique messages taking positions on any side of issues. 

In a field experiment conducted in 2020 in the United States, advocacy letters were composed on six different issues and those letters were used to train what was then the state-of-the-art generative AI model, GPT-3. These randomised AI- and human-written letters were sent to 7,200 state legislators. Then the response rates were compared to the human-written and AI-generated correspondence to assess the extent to which legislators were able to discern (and therefore not respond to) machine-written appeals. On three issues, the response rates to AI- and human-written messages were statistically indistinguishable. On three other issues, the response rates to AI-generated emails were lower—but only by 2 per cent, on average. This suggests that a malicious actor capable of easily generating thousands of unique communications could potentially skew legislators’ perceptions of which issues are most important to their constituents as well as how constituents feel about any given issue.

Democratic representation

In the same way, generative AI could strike a double blow against the quality of democratic representation by rendering obsolete the public comment process through which citizens can seek to influence the actions of the regulatory state. Legislators necessarily write statutes   granting administrative agencies considerable discretion not only to resolve technical questions requiring substantive expertise. AI, however, makes every user the equivalent of a native constituent and affords space to influence rulemaking process. Similarly, AI is being used to create spam sites and to flood sites with fake reviews. 

The proliferation of social media platforms allows the effortless dissemination of misinformation, including its efficient channeling to specific constituencies. Research suggests that readers across the political spectrum cannot distinguish between a range of human-made and AI-generated content especially in a polarised political landscape. Late Henry Kissinger, therefore cautions "Our task will be to understand  the transformations  that AI brings to human experience, the challenges it presents to human identity, and which aspects of these developments require regulation or counterbalancing by other human commitments”.

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)