How Will Advanced Ai Systems Impact Democracy 2409 06729v1

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 11:03 AM

how will advanced ai systems impact democracy 2409 06729v1

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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. Competing interests: The following authors are full- or part-time remunerated employees of commercial developers of AI technology: M. Bakker, I.G., N.M., M.H.T. and M. Botvinick (Google DeepMind), E.D. and D.G.

(Anthropic) and T.E. (OpenAI), A.P. (Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), Meta). C.S. and K.H. are part-time remunerated government employees (at the UK AI Security Institute).

D.S. and S.H. are employees of the non-profit organization Collective Intelligence Project. A.O. is an employee of the AI & Democracy Foundation. E.S.

is an employee of Demos. None of these employers had any role in the preparation of the manuscript or the decision to publish. The remaining authors declare no competing interests. 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 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. Advanced AI systems capable of generating humanlike text and multimodal content are now widely available. In this paper, we discuss the impacts that generative artificial intelligence may have on democratic processes. We consider the consequences of AI for citizens’ ability to make informed choices about political representatives and issues (epistemic impacts).

We ask how AI might be used to destabilise or support democratic mechanisms like elections (material impacts). Finally, we discuss whether AI will strengthen or weaken democratic principles (foundational impacts). It is widely acknowledged that new AI systems could pose significant challenges for democracy. However, it has also been argued that generative AI offers new opportunities to educate and learn from citizens, strengthen public discourse, help people find common ground, and to reimagine how democracies might work better.

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(Anthropic) And T.E. (OpenAI), A.P. (Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), Meta).

(Anthropic) and T.E. (OpenAI), A.P. (Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), Meta). C.S. and K.H. are part-time remunerated government employees (at the UK AI Security Institute).

D.S. And S.H. Are Employees Of The Non-profit Organization Collective

D.S. and S.H. are employees of the non-profit organization Collective Intelligence Project. A.O. is an employee of the AI & Democracy Foundation. E.S.