Generative Ai And The Future Of Democratic Citizenship

You have full access to this open access article The purported threats that the algorithmic creation, ordering, and manipulation of information in the digital sphere may pose to democracy have received considerable academic attention in recent years. In seeking to extend this discussion beyond the focus on formal and procedural aspects of democracy, this paper adopts a Deweyan conception of democracy and considers specifically the potential impact of generative-AI technologies (genAI)... This, we argue, reveals underexplored democratic challenges posed by such increasingly ubiquitous technologies. As a flourishing democratic culture is fundamentally dependent on its epistemic richness and diversity, this directs one to consider if and how the use of genAI technologies might undermine these aspects. Both the technical architecture of genAI and the specific ways they are used in ordinary life demonstrate their ability to intercede in or mediate epistemic participation in democratic culture and, importantly, their tendency to...

As such, we discuss how genAI might further epistemic injustices that negatively impact democratic culture in still underappreciated but salient ways. Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript. Many of us live in a state of epistemic dependence on digital technologies. We routinely acquire, review, circulate, and discuss information about the world we live in by accessing some application, website, or digital tool that determines which parcels of information come to our attention. Given such widespread epistemic reliance, it should perhaps concern more of us (or concern us more) that such algorithmic informational structuring often fails to reflect or account for the diverse epistemic needs of its... Rather, any supposed tailoring or personalisation of information is largely geared towards users understood as consumers of a product without recognising that these same products (e.g., social media platforms) have ballooned into venues where...

Floridi, 2007). Accordingly, such platforms may prioritise ‘attention’ and ‘clicks’ rather than, for example, meaningful engagement, exposure to difference, and the nurturing of communal bonds. Recent technological advances have prompted further reflection on the social, ethical, and epistemic ramifications of the automation of information. A particularly significant development has been the advancement and widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems and applications that can generate content. The term ‘generative AI’ (genAI) is typically used to capture a broad swath of technologies rooted in AI methodologies, mostly Large Language Models (LLMs). Such LLMs are designed to produce responses to user prompts that are based on statistical predictions learnt from training data—leading some to refer to them as “stochastic parrots” (Bender et al., 2021).

Presently, AI-generated content takes on many forms, including the synthesis of realistic images, textual content, music compositions, and even complex data structures relevant to scientific domains (Gozalo-Brizuela & Garrido-Merchán, 2023). Of particular relevance in this article is the remarkable ability of genAI to produce texts of relevance to many domains of life that strikingly resemble human-produced texts. These range from seemingly intelligent and accessible “answers” to user questions to the composition of poems, lyrics, student essays, news articles, academic texts, and the like. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Dr Amy Ross Arguedas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), where she works on the Trust in News Project. Felix is a Research Fellow in AI and News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and a former DPhil student at the OII.

A former Leverhulme and Dieter Schwarz Scholar, he researches AI in journalism and the news.

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