Ai S Impact On Access To Information In Democracies

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 10:29 AM

ai s impact on access to information in democracies

One of the most urgent challenges facing democracies is a widening digital divide: wealthier groups will increasingly access expert verified information while lower income communities will not be given tools to navigate an online... To safeguard democratic participation, we must democratize AI literacy and detection tools, and integrate civic education. Only by reinforcing these initiatives can democracy remain resilient in the age of AI. Julian Neylan (MS, Leiden University) serves as Dissemination and Defense Lead at DISARM, where he advances the framework of online influence tactics, techniques, and procedures and helps design defensive measures. He is also the Training Programme Lead at Alliance4Europe, having trained more than 150 organizations across government, academia, and civil society. Previously, he developed media literacy tools and published research on online influence in outlets such as Scientific Reports and World Medical & Health Policy.

Barrington, Sarah, Emily A. Cooper, and Hany Farid. “People Are Poorly Equipped to Detect AI-Powered Voice Clones.” Scientific Reports 15, no. 1 (March 31, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94170-3. Bassi, Eleonora, and Ugo Pagallo.

“Just Hallucinations? The Problem of AI Literacy with a New Digital Divide.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, September 6, 2025, 204–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01429-0_18. Capraro, Valerio, Austin Lentsch, Daron Acemoglu, Selin Akgun, Aisel Akhmedova, Ennio Bilancini, Jean-François Bonnefon, et al. “The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Socioeconomic Inequalities and Policy Making.” PNAS Nexus 3, no. 6 (May 31, 2024).

https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae191. 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. Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. Here we ask what impact this will have on the democratic process. We consider the consequences of AI for citizens’ ability to make educated and competent choices about political representatives and issues (epistemic impacts).

We explore how AI might be used to destabilize or support the mechanisms, including elections, by which democracy is implemented (material impacts). Finally, we discuss whether AI will strengthen or weaken the principles on which democracy is based (foundational impacts). The arrival of new AI systems clearly poses substantial challenges for democracy. However, we argue that AI systems also offer new opportunities to educate and learn from citizens, strengthen public discourse, help people to find common ground, and reimagine how democracies might work better. 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 Professor of Public Policy, James Bryant Conant University Professor Director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government Professor of the Practice of Public Policy, HKS; Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, SEAS 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. UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted by all Member States in November 2021, is the first global policy framework for artificial intelligence (AI) and outlines different aspects of this technology that... The initial considerations of the Recommendation outline the potential ramifications of AI across diverse domains, notably its implications for democracy. This report builds on these analyses and recommendations, aligning with the core values and principles outlined in the Recommendation. It delves into the current and potential impact of artificial intelligence on democracy and the benefits that both artificial intelligence and digitalization, in general, could bring to enhancing collective decision-making processes.

This analysis is structured around four key topics: Finally, this report offers recommendations for the democratic governance of artificial intelligence aimed at mitigating neative impacts and fostering a more democratic approach to AI governance.

Ai S Impact On Access To Information In Democracies

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