How Advanced Ai Systems Shape Modern Democracy

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 The emergence of artificial intelligence and its power go hand in hand with growing public anxiety about job security, media literacy, and almost every sector of everyday life.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 39 percent of Americans were highly concerned that AI would be mostly used for bad purposes during the 2024 presidential campaign, with only 5 percent believing... Current public consensus reflects growing fears over AI’s role in an increasingly digitized democracy, and for good reason. The increased use of AI-generated content and the shift of several countries including the Philippines, Myanmar, and the United States towards digital authoritarianism by embracing tools such as AI-powered mass surveillance raises the stakes... Beyond the complexities posed to the information climate, the ability for faster content creation also holds the potential to impact democratic discourse and challenge the integrity of elections. But while these concerns have merit, what’s often missing from the conversation is AI’s potential to strengthen democratic systems and practices; how local governments, consulting platforms, and civic societies are using it as a... I conducted this research as part of my internship at the National Civic League’s Center for Democratic Innovation, which looks into understanding new and improved ways to make democracy more participatory, equitable, and productive.

As a political science major who also studies communication technology platforms and practices, I have always been intrigued by the ways AI has penetrated and shaped the civic space, as well as in exploring... And yet, the realm of AI itself is inherently broad, and it can be difficult to grapple how it interacts with our democratic systems without a closer inspection of specific areas and case studies. The purpose of this article is to help readers better understand the status quo of how AI is being used in government and civic spaces and to shed light on the challenges and opportunities... My research process consisted of four primary stages. My research identified three primary areas in which AI is being increasingly used in democratic life: Nicol Turner Lee, Joseph B.

Keller, Cameron F. Kerry, Aaron Klein, Anton Korinek, Mark MacCarthy, Mark Muro, Chinasa T. Okolo, Courtney C. Radsch, John Villasenor, Darrell M. West, Tom Wheeler, Andrew W. Wyckoff, Rashawn Ray, Mishaela Robison

Melanie W. Sisson, Colin Kahl, Sun Chenghao, Xiao Qian Norman Eisen, Renée Rippberger, Jonathan Katz Langdon Winner’s classic essay ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ resists a widespread but naïve view of the role of technology in human life: that technology is neutral, and all depends on use.Footnote 1 He does... Instead, Winner distinguishes two ways for artefacts to have ‘political qualities’. First, devices or systems might be means for establishing patterns of power or authority, but the design is flexible: such patterns can turn out one way or another.

An example is traffic infrastructure, which can assist many people but also keep parts of the population in subordination, say, if they cannot reach suitable workplaces. Secondly, devices or systems are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, tied to certain patterns of power. Winner’s example is atomic energy, which requires industrial, scientific, and military elites to provide and protect energy sources. Artificial Intelligence (AI), I argue, is political the way traffic infrastructure is: It can greatly strengthen democracy, but only with the right efforts. Understanding ‘the politics of AI’ is crucial since Xi Jinping’s China loudly champions one-party rule as a better fit for our digital century. AI is a key component in the contest between authoritarian and democratic rule.

Unlike conventional programs, AI algorithms learn by themselves. Programmers provide data, which a set of methods, known as machine learning, analyze for trends and inferences. Owing to their sophistication and sweeping applications, these technologies are poised to dramatically alter our world. Specialized AI is already broadly deployed. At the high end, one may think of AI mastering Chess or Go. More commonly we encounter it in smartphones (Siri, Google Translate, curated newsfeeds), home devices (Alexa, Google Home, Nest), personalized customer services, or GPS systems.

Specialized AI is used by law enforcement, the military, in browser searching, advertising and entertainment (e.g., recommender systems), medical diagnostics, logistics, finance (from assessing credit to flagging transactions), in speech recognition producing transcripts, trade... Governments track people using AI in facial, voice, or gait recognition. Smart cities analyze traffic data in real time or design services. COVID-19 accelerated use of AI in drug discovery. Natural language processing – normally used for texts – interprets genetic changes in viruses. Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud’s low- and no-code offerings could soon let people create AI applications as easily as websites.Footnote 2

General AI approximates human performance across many domains. Once there is general AI smarter than we are, it could produce something smarter than itself, and so on, perhaps very fast. That moment is the singularity, an intelligence explosion with possibly grave consequences. We are nowhere near anything like that. Imitating how mundane human tasks combine agility, reflection, and interaction has proven challenging. However, ‘nowhere near’ means ‘in terms of engineering capacities’.

A few breakthroughs might accelerate things enormously. Inspired by how millions of years of evolution have created the brain, neural nets have been deployed in astounding ways in machine learning. Such research indicates to many observers that general AI will emerge eventually.Footnote 3 This essay is located at the intersection of political philosophy, philosophy of technology, and political history. My purpose is to reflect on medium and long-term prospects and challenges for democracy from AI, emphasizing how critical a stage this is. Social theorist Bruno Latour, a key figure in Science, Technology and Society Studies, has long insisted no entity matters in isolation but attains meaning through numerous, changeable relations.

Human activities tend to depend not only on more people than the protagonists who stand out, but also on non-human entities. Latour calls such multitudes of relations actor-networks.Footnote 4 This perspective takes the materiality of human affairs more seriously than is customary, the ways they critically involve artefacts, devices, or systems. This standpoint helps gauge AI’s impact on democracy. Political theorists treat democracy as an ideal or institutional framework, instead of considering its materiality. Modern democracies involve structures for collective choice that periodically empower relatively few people to steer the social direction for everybody. As in all forms of governance, technology shapes how this unfolds.

Technology explains how citizens obtain information that delineates their participation (often limited to voting) and frees up people’s time to engage in collective affairs to begin with. Devices and mechanisms permeate campaigning and voting. Technology shapes how politicians communicate and bureaucrats administer decisions. Specialized AI changes the materiality of democracy, not just in the sense that independently given actors deploy new tools. AI changes how collective decision making unfolds and what its human participants are like: how they see themselves in relation to their environment, what relationships they have and how those are designed, and generally... See citation below for complete author information.

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