Project Muse Ai S Real Dangers For Democracy

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 10:33 AM

project muse ai s real dangers for 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. Virginia Eubanks is a journalist, writer and political scientist at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her most recent book is Automating Inequality (2018).

Individuals are picked out on a screen in a demonstration of facial-recognition technology in Shanghai, China. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders MIT Press (2025) The tsunami of writing on artificial intelligence tends towards either bald hype or panicked dystopianism. Proponents say that AI will revolutionize health care, drive business growth and become our new best friend.

But for its critics, AI could cause massive unemployment, perpetuate fake news and pose an extinction risk to humankind. Why an overreliance on AI-driven modelling is bad for science Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing many sectors, from business to healthcare. But what about democracy? While AI offers exciting potential to enhance governance and improve services, it also poses serious risks to democratic systems worldwide. This technology is reshaping how people interact with political institutions, how policies are made, and how power is distributed across societies.

In this article, we’ll explore how AI is disrupting democracies, its challenges, and the opportunities it offers. AI has immense power to shape the future. It can analyze data, detect patterns, and help solve problems more efficiently. But it also brings a host of challenges. It threatens privacy, can manipulate public opinion, and may lead to authoritarian control. In democracies, these threats could undermine the very principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability.

Yet, AI also offers potential benefits, such as improved public services and greater citizen engagement. AI makes it easier than ever for governments and companies to track individual behavior. From facial recognition systems to data analysis tools, AI can monitor citizens on an unprecedented scale. In democracies, this could lead to serious privacy violations. Governments may use AI to analyze social media posts, search histories, or even predict behavior. In some countries, surveillance can feel like a constant, silent presence.

We must ask: can democracy thrive in a society where privacy is constantly under threat? These AI-driven technologies often lack transparency and accountability. In turn, they risk enabling governments to track and monitor their citizens more easily, even in democratic societies. Though many democratic nations have privacy laws, AI can slip through these cracks, creating a surveillance state. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

As perhaps the most consequential technology of our time, Generative Foundation Models (GFMs) present unprecedented challenges for democratic institutions. By allowing deception and de-contextualized information sharing at a previously unimaginable scale and pace, GFMs could undermine the foundations of democracy. At the same time, the investment scale required to develop the models and the race dynamics around that development threaten to enable concentrations of democratically unaccountable power (both public and private). This essay examines the twin threats of collapse and singularity occasioned by the rise of GFMs. 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. As perhaps the most consequential technology of our time, Generative Foundation Models (GFMs) present unprecedented challenges for democratic institutions. By allowing deception and de-contextualized information sharing at a previously unimaginable scale and pace, GFMs could undermine the foundations of democracy. At the same time, the investment scale required to develop the models and the race dynamics around that development threaten to enable concentrations of democratically unaccountable power (both public and private).

This essay examines the twin threats of collapse and singularity occasioned by the rise of GFMs. Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. E. Glen Weyl is research lead at Plural Technology Collaboratory and Microsoft Research Special Projects and Chair, Plurality Institute. Artificial Intelligence, Digital technology, Surveillance Science fiction may soon become reality with the advent of AI systems that can independently pursue their own objectives.

Guardrails are needed now to save us from the worst outcomes.

Project Muse Ai S Real Dangers For Democracy

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