Ai S Real Dangers For Democracy Journal Of Democracy

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 11:09 AM

ai s real dangers for democracy journal of democracy

In 2024, observers worldwide braced for the electoral impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI). With those contests over, attention should shift to the longer-term risks AI poses to democracy. This essay predicts three such risks. First, AI-backed efforts to replace political communication may erode representative democracy. Second, AI may exacerbate trends toward the concentration of wealth and power, preserving only the façade of democracy. Third, economic trends in media and technology threaten to emaciate already weakened sources of trustworthy information.

Avoiding these outcomes will require policymakers to reduce their reliance on the perspectives of industry professionals. Dean Jackson is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the principal of Public Circle, LLC, a research consultancy focused on democracy, technology, and media. Samuel C. Woolley is associate professor of communication and holds the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth (2020).

Image Credit: Utku Ucrak/Anadolu via Getty Images Artificial Intelligence, Digital technology, Economic inequality In this episode of our special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we explore “AI’s Real Dangers for Democracy,” the new article penned by Dean Jackson and Samuel Woolley (Journal of... 36, No. 4, October 2025) Jackson and Woolley discuss the ways in which AI could strain, or even crack, the foundations of democracies; reflect on how the debate surrounding AI is structured and how it has evolved; and recommend...

The podcast was recorded on October 9, the same day when Jackson and Wooley published an analysis in The Guardian on how AI threatens elections. Dean Jackson is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the principal of Public Circle, LLC, a research consultancy focused on democracy, technology, and media. Samuel Woolley is associate professor of communication and holds the William S. Dietrich the Second Endowed Chair in Disinformation Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into digital platforms has escalated threats to democratic integrity worldwide, primarily through algorithmic manipulation, generative AI technologies, and large language models (LLMs). This study comprehensively investigates how these advanced technologies are systematically leveraged by state and non-state actors to destabilise democracies.

The paper scrutinises empirical cases from the United States, European Union, India, Türkiye, Argentina, and Taiwan, analysing the operational mechanisms and socio-political implications of AI-driven disinformation. Findings demonstrate how generative AI, deepfake technologies, and sophisticated behavioural targeting exacerbate polarisation, weaken institutional trust, and distort electoral processes. Despite the growing prevalence of such cyber-enabled interference, regulatory and institutional responses remain fragmented and inadequate. Consequently, this research culminates in proposing a robust strategic implementation framework, emphasising platform transparency, regulatory innovation, technological safeguards, and civic resilience measures. This framework provides actionable guidance for safeguarding democratic integrity amid evolving AI threats. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The explosive rise of generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine, but it could also have a disruptive influence on politics. For example, asking a chatbot how to navigate a complicated bureaucracy or to help draft a letter to an elected official could bolster civic engagement. However, that same technology—with its potential to produce disinformation and misinformation at scale—threatens to interfere with democratic representation, undermine democratic accountability, and corrode social and political trust. This essay analyzes the scope of the threat in each of these spheres and discusses potential guardrails for these misuses, including neural networks used to identify generated content, self-regulation by generative-AI platforms, and greater... Just a month after its introduction, ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, hit 100-million monthly users, making it the fastest-growing application in history. For context, it took the video-streaming service Netflix, now a household name, three-and-a-half years to reach one-million monthly users.

But unlike Netflix, the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and its potential for good or ill sparked considerable debate. Would students be able to use, or rather misuse, the tool for research or writing? Would it put journalists and coders out of business? Would it “hijack democracy,” as one New York Times op-ed put it, by enabling mass, phony inputs to perhaps influence democratic representation?1 And most fundamentally (and apocalyptically), could advances in artificial intelligence actually pose... Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government, adjunct professor of law, and the director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.

Doug Kriner is the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government at Cornell University. New technologies raise new questions and concerns of different magnitudes and urgency. For example, the fear that generative AI—artificial intelligence capable of producing new content—poses an existential threat is neither plausibly imminent, nor necessarily plausible. Nick Bostrom’s paperclip scenario, in which a machine programmed to optimize paperclips eliminates everything standing in its way of achieving that goal, is not on the verge of becoming reality.3 Whether children or university... The employment consequences of generative AI will ultimately be difficult to adjudicate since economies are complex, making it difficult to isolate the net effect of AI-instigated job losses versus industry gains. Yet the potential consequences for democracy are immediate and severe.

Generative AI threatens three central pillars of democratic governance: representation, accountability, and, ultimately, the most important currency in a political system—trust. Voters change their opinions after interacting with an AI chatbot – but, encouragingly, it seems that AIs rely on facts to influence people AI chatbots may have the power to influence voters’ opinions Does the persuasive power of AI chatbots spell the beginning of the end for democracy? In one of the largest surveys to date exploring how these tools can influence voter attitudes, AI chatbots were more persuasive than traditional political campaign tools including advertisements and pamphlets, and as persuasive as... But at least some researchers identify reasons for optimism in the way in which the AI tools shifted opinions.

We have already seen that AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be highly convincing, persuading conspiracy theorists that their beliefs are incorrect and winning more support for a viewpoint when pitted against human debaters. This persuasive power has naturally led to fears that AI could place its digital thumb on the scale in consequential elections, or that bad actors could marshal these chatbots to steer users towards their... The bad news is that these fears may not be totally baseless. In a study of thousands of voters taking part in recent US, Canadian and Polish presidential elections, David Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues found that AI chatbots were surprisingly... Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world. It will bring unimaginable changes to our economy, our politics, warfare, our emotional wellbeing, our environment, and how we educate and raise our children.

Further, there is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet. Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and the speed at which it is progressing, AI is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media and within the general population. That has got to change. Now. Several months ago, as the ranking member of the US Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, I undertook an investigation regarding the monumental challenges that we face with the rapid development of... Recently, I held a public discussion with Nobel prize winner Dr Geoffrey Hinton, considered to be the “Godfather” of AI, to get his views on a wide range of AI related subjects.

Based on our investigation and other information that we are gathering, my staff and I will soon be presenting a very specific set of recommendations to Congress as to how we can begin addressing... Here are some of the outstanding questions that we intend to answer in our report:

Ai S Real Dangers For Democracy Journal Of Democracy

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