Will Ai End Democracy Journal Of Democracy

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 10:33 AM

will ai end democracy journal of democracy

Over the past few years, Silicon Valley has steadily released a raft of computer programs with capabilities that seem ripped from the pages of science fiction. In the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, we bring together leading thinkers and experts to explore the challenges that artificial intelligence poses, and how democratic institutions can be marshaled to help meet... 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. By Yoshua Bengio How AI Threatens Democracy Generative AI can flood the media, internet, and even personal correspondence with misinformation—sowing confusion for voters and government officials alike.

If we fail to act, mounting mistrust will polarize our societies and tear at our institutions. By Sarah Kreps, Doug Kriner The Danger of Runaway AI 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. By Tom Davidson The Authoritarian Data Problem AI is destined to become another stage for geopolitical conflict.

In this contest, autocracies have the advantage, as they vacuum up valuable data from democracies, while democracies inevitably incorporate data tainted by repression. By Eddie Yang, Margaret E. Roberts arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. There are many risks that Generative AI pose to democracies, analysts suggest: The opaqueness of AI algorithms at the back end may suppress legitimate political discourse while favoring established opinions Generative AI could worsen the news ecosystem and lead to significant financial stresses on news outlets... A recent discussion (above) at the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies examined challenges and opportunities for deepening democratic engagement in AI governance. Elizabeth Kerley (Forum) shared key findings from an International Forum report, Setting Democratic Ground Rules for AI: Reflections from Civil Society.

Natalia Carfi (Open Data Charter) provided comments and shared further insights on opportunities for promoting democratic approaches to AI. Ryan Heath (Axios Global Technology Correspondent) moderated the discussion. ‘Will AI End Democracy?‘ was the question raised in a recent symposium in The 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. You have full access to this open access article When discussing the impact of AI on democracy, the debate predominantly centers on its potential threats, such as misinformation and polarization.

However, the role of AI in addressing the democratic crisis is more nuanced. This paper examines three ways that AI might impact the crisis of democracy and discusses the conditions for which these scenarios are more likely to materialize. Firstly, AI could exacerbate this crisis by degrading the public sphere, exacerbating authoritarian rule and increasing power asymmetries. Second, AI could alleviate some aspects of the crisis of democracy by improving public services, rationalizing public debate, or paving the way for new forms of collective participation. Thirdly, AI could overcome this crisis by paving the way for new forms of government beyond the current representative systems. If AI will exacerbate, alleviate, or overcome the crisis of democracy will depend not just on AI itself, but rather on the complex sociotechnical relationship between technology and the cultural, social, economic, legal, and...

Therefore, we should avoid an essentialist perspective that consider “democracy” and “AI” as givens and embrace a more sociotechnical perspective that looks at how these two elements mutually influence each other. Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript. Numerous scholars have debated the impact of digital technology on society and political systems. Recently, pessimistic and more critical perspectives have gained prominence, extending beyond academic and intellectual circles. In the United States, 78% of the population distrusts big tech companies, and 64% believe that social media has negatively impacted society, with only 10% perceiving its impact as positive [112]. Artificial intelligence is no exception.

Concerns about this technology have grown in recent years, with 52% of U.S. citizens expressing more worry than excitement about AI, compared to just 10% who feel the opposite [111]. The debate over what constitutes artificial intelligence is vast and cannot be fully addressed here. Many scholars argue that comparisons with human intelligence are misleading, primarily because AI applications operate in fundamentally different ways from the human mind. [20, 45]. As Luciano Floridi suggested [25], AI is a “shortcut” for generically referring to different disciplines, services and products.

Therefore, a monolithic definition risks being misleading. However, we can embrace an internationally recognized working definition such as that proposed by the OECD, which claims that:

Will Ai End Democracy Journal Of Democracy

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