How will advanced AI systems impact democracy?
This addresses the societal problem of AI's influence on democracy, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing discussions without new empirical results.
The paper examines how generative AI systems affect democratic processes, including epistemic, material, and foundational impacts, noting both challenges and opportunities for democracy.
Advanced AI systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that generative artificial intelligence may have on democratic processes. We consider the consequences of AI for citizens' ability to make informed choices about political representatives and issues (epistemic impacts). We ask how AI might be used to destabilise or support democratic mechanisms like elections (material impacts). Finally, we discuss whether AI will strengthen or weaken democratic principles (foundational impacts). It is widely acknowledged that new AI systems could pose significant challenges for democracy. However, it has also been argued that generative AI offers new opportunities to educate and learn from citizens, strengthen public discourse, help people find common ground, and to reimagine how democracies might work better.