University of Kwazulu-Natal

How Ai Threatens Democracy Journal Of Democracy

Bonisiwe Shabane
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how ai threatens democracy journal of democracy

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. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. 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... Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. 2715 North Charles StreetBaltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 ©2025 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

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. As artificial intelligence continues to advance at breakneck speed and world powers vie against each other in the AI arms race, democracies are searching for ways to control a technology that is transforming our... Read the following Journal of Democracy essays from leading AI experts on the dangers that lie ahead and how we might stave off a crisis. The Real Dangers of Generative AI Advanced AI faces twin perils: the collapse of democratic control over key state functions or the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the few. Avoiding these risks will require new ways of governing.

Danielle Allen and E. Glen Weyl AI and Catastrophic Risk AI with superhuman abilities could emerge within the next few years, and there is currently no guarantee that we will be able to control them. We must act now to protect democracy, human rights, and our very existence. Yoshua Bengio How AI Threatens Democracy Generative AI can flood the media, internet, and even personal correspondence, sowing confusion for voters and government officials alike.

If we fail to act, mounting mistrust will polarize our societies and tear at our institutions. Sarah Kreps and Doug Kriner

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