‎explain To Shane Candidates Bots And Ballots How Ai Is Rewriting

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 10:19 AM

‎explain to shane candidates bots and ballots how ai is rewriting

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in. Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates. Generative AI poses new challenges for political campaigning and our democracy as we head towards the 2024 presidential election. While this technology could streamline political messaging, there is greater fear that it could enable widespread manipulation and distortion of the democratic process. Heading into a contentious election, how can we assess and mitigate harms from AI-generated disinformation? How will the use of generative AI be different than prior “cheap fake” attempts?

How should policymakers prepare for and respond to the use of AI in political advertising? On this episode, Shane is joined by Scott Brennen and Matt Perault, co-authors of “The new political ad machine: Policy frameworks for political ads in an age of AI.” They discuss how generative AI... The last decade taught us painful lessons about how social media can reshape democracy: misinformation spreads faster than truth, online communities harden into echo chambers, and political divisions deepen as polarization grows. Now, another wave of technology is transforming how voters learn about elections—only faster, at scale, and with far less visibility. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others, are becoming the new vessels (and sometimes, arbiters) of political information. Our research suggests their influence is already rippling through our democracy.

LLMs are being adopted at a pace that makes social media uptake look slow. At the same time, traffic to traditional news and search sites has declined. As the 2026 midterms near, more than half of Americans now have access to AI, which can be used to gather information about candidates, issues, and elections. Meanwhile, researchers and firms are exploring the use of AI to simulate polling results or to understand how to synthesize voter opinions. These models may appear neutral—politically unbiased, and merely summarizing facts from different sources found in their training data or on the internet. At the same time, they operate as black boxes, designed and trained in ways users can’t see.

Researchers are actively trying to unravel the question of whose opinions LLMs reflect. Given their immense power, prevalence, and ability to “personalize” information, these models have the potential to shape what voters believe about candidates, issues, and elections as a whole. And we don’t yet know the extent of that influence. Generative AI poses new challenges for political campaigning and our democracy as we head towards the 2024 presidential election. While this technology could streamline political messaging, there is greater fear that it could enable widespread manipulation and distortion of the democratic process. Heading into a contentious election, how can we assess and mitigate harms from AI-generated disinformation?

How will the use of generative AI be different than prior “cheap fake” attempts? How should policymakers prepare for and respond to the use of AI in political advertising? On this episode, Shane is joined by Scott Brennen and Matt Perault, co-authors of “The new political ad machine: Policy frameworks for political ads in an age of AI.” They discuss how generative AI... Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More How should we address the governance gap between central banks controlling money and the oversight of cryptocurrency?

How can decentralized crypto networks and centralized monetary authorities collaborate? And what’s next for digital finance? To explore these questions, Shane Tews is joined by Milton Mueller, Karim Farhat, and Vagisha Srivastava from the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. Mueller is the cofounder and director of the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech, where he specializes in the political economy of the internet. Farhat is the assistant director of the Internet Governance Project, focusing primarily on the digital economy and cybersecurity. Srivastava is a PhD student working on internet fragmentation.

They are also joined by Nicoletta Kolpakov, director of the Cirrus Institute. This group’s extensive knowledge makes for an engaging and informative episode. Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act is the foundation of open banking in the United States—giving individuals the right to access and share their own financial data with services of their choice. This rule seeks to increase consumer control, encourage competition, and make it easier to switch providers or use financial management tools. However, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the agency responsible for implementing this provision—is now reconsidering how (or whether) it should be enforced. In today’s discussion, we explore why Section 1033 has become a key focus of rulemaking and how changes to open banking policies could shift the balance of power between consumers, financial institutions, and emerging...

To look into this, Shane Tews spoke with Penny Lee, president and CEO of the Financial Technology Association. Penny is also the cofounder of K Street Capital—an angel investment group in Washington, DC—and served as a senior advisor for former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She brings more than two decades of experience in the private and public sectors, making for an informative conversation. Bluesky Social is a social media app that was originally launched in 2019 on Twitter, before becoming an independent company in 2021. Bluesky’s mission is to offer a decentralized experience for users—where algorithms are not imposed on them, but they can choose their content preferences. The platform also highlights the importance of portability, enabling users to carry their social media ecosystems across different platforms.

But what are the technical and social challenges to making true platform portability a reality? Co-hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer look back at the last five months of headlines as they celebrate the twentieth episode of Terms of Engagement. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Michelle Feldman, political director at Mobile Voting, a nonprofit, nonpartisan initiative working to make voting easier with expanded access to mobile voting. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer discuss whether fusion voting expands representation and strengthens smaller parties—or whether it muddies party lines and confuses voters. Creating a healthy digital civic infrastructure ecosystem means not just deploying technology for the sake of efficiency, but thoughtfully designing tools built to enhance democratic engagement from connection to action. Public engagement has long been too time-consuming and costly for governments to sustain, but AI offers tools to make participation more systematic and impactful.

Our new Reboot Democracy Workshop Series replaces lectures with hands-on sessions that teach the practical “how-to’s” of AI-enhanced engagement. Together with leading practitioners and partners at InnovateUS and the Allen Lab at Harvard, we’ll explore how AI can help institutions tap the collective intelligence of our communities more efficiently and effectively. AI isn’t just coming for politics, it’s already reshaping it. And the campaigns that learn to wield it early may end up rewriting the rules of power itself. Most political operations still rely on big data, basic algorithms, and first-gen predictive analytics — tools that have been around for over a decade. Compared to private industry and even parts of the public sector, politics is late to the AI party.

But that’s exactly why now is the time to pay attention. Because campaigns that begin experimenting with AI today, even modestly, will gain an edge their opponents can’t match. Each cycle will widen the gap between adopters and those left behind. Thanks for reading Cody’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Campaigns aren’t truly using AI yet, not at scale, and certainly not with the sophistication seen in tech, finance, or defense.

But they could be. And soon, they’ll need to be. Because AI is poised to transform the most essential components of political campaigning: research, messaging, organizing, and persuasion. These tools won’t just streamline operations — they’ll enable precision outreach: microtargeted messaging, real-time sentiment analysis, and simulations of how specific voter segments might respond to policies before a single ad airs or a... Emory experts weigh in on how chatbots, algorithmic targeting, deepfakes and a sea of misinformation — and the tools designed to counter them — might sway how we vote in November and beyond. Or so it seemed.

The voice on the other end of the line sounded just like President Joe Biden. He even used his signature catchphrase: “What a bunch of malarkey!” But strangely, he was telling these would-be voters to stay away from the polls, falsely warning them that voting in the primary would... The robocalls didn’t necessarily impact the voting results; Biden still handily won the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Nevertheless, the stunt sent shockwaves through the worlds of politics, media and technology because the misleading message didn’t come from the president — it came from a machine. The call was what’s known as a deepfake, a recording generated by artificial intelligence (AI), made by a political consultant to sound exactly like Biden and, in this case, apparently suppress voter turnout. It was one of the most high-profile examples of how generative AI is being used in the realm of politics.

These deepfakes are affecting both sides of the political aisle. In summer 2023, the early days of the Republican race for the presidency, would-be candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shared deepfakes of former President Donald Trump hugging Anthony Fauci, one of the leaders and lightning rods of the U.S.’s COVID-19 response. And, despite being a victim of deepfake tactics like this, Trump has not been afraid to turn around and use them himself. Famously, this included his recent Truth Social post of AI-manipulated photos that showed pop star Taylor Swift, decked out as Uncle Sam, endorsing him for president. There is great public concern about the potential use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for political persuasion and the resulting impacts on elections and democracy1,2,3,4,5,6.

We inform these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes. In the context of the 2024 US presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, we assigned participants randomly to have a conversation with an AI model that advocated... We observed significant treatment effects on candidate preference that are larger than typically observed from traditional video advertisements7,8,9. We also document large persuasion effects on Massachusetts residents’ support for a ballot measure legalizing psychedelics. Examining the persuasion strategies9 used by the models indicates that they persuade with relevant facts and evidence, rather than using sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques. Not all facts and evidence presented, however, were accurate; across all three countries, the AI models advocating for candidates on the political right made more inaccurate claims.

Together, these findings highlight the potential for AI to influence voters and the important role it might play in future elections. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Receive 51 print issues and online access

‎explain To Shane Candidates Bots And Ballots How Ai Is Rewriting

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