If You Can Keep It Ai In This Election And Beyond Npr

A woman holds a American flag during a naturalization ceremony. JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images hide caption A woman holds a American flag during a naturalization ceremony. It's a technology that promises to bring radical change to many facets of our life – from the arts to healthcare and business. During the 2024 election season, experts warn it could also shake up the world of politics. We're talking about artificial intelligence.

2024 is the first presidential election with the powerful technology in play. Currently, there are few regulations about the use of AI in politics. Last month, the Federal Election Commission decided not to impose new rules on the tech ahead of the election. That means it's fair game and it's being used as such. To listen to explicit episodes, sign in. Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.

The Independent Center is using AI to identify congressional districts where independent candidates could win over the Democratic or Republican candidate. Its goal is to elect at least a handful of independents to disrupt the two-party system on Capitol Hill. Glenn Harvey for NPR hide caption The rise of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: People are feeding their blood test results into chatbots, turning to ChatGPT for advice on their love lives and leaning on AI... Now, one organization suggests artificial intelligence can go beyond making daily life more convenient. It says it's the key to reshaping American politics.

"Without AI, what we're trying to do would be impossible," explained Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters. The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates. Artificial intelligence has permeated the tech sector, and more and more platforms are adding it to the user experience. Recently, Google integrated AI for basic searches. If you Google a question, an AI-generated text box pops up at the top of the page with an answer. Though technology reporter Kara Swisher says Google’s AI is becoming pretty accurate, it could hurt media companies.

Offering the answer through AI dissuades people from clicking on news content, therefore slowing web traffic to media sites. That could lead to a drop in revenue, further hurting media companies struggling to survive in the digital age. “It just sort of essentially scrapes information and re-presents it to you. There’s no need to go anywhere but Google,” Swisher says. “They become the all-answer. And at some point, this AI can make content of its own.”

Some news companies are responding. The Financial Times will license its content; whenever it’s used by AI companies like ChatGPT, the company will get paid. Others like the New York Times have filed lawsuits against AI companies. “You don’t have a choice in this way,” Swisher says. “You either sue them or deal with them.” Nature volume 648, pages 394–401 (2025)Cite this article

There is great public concern about the potential use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for political persuasion and the resulting impacts on elections and democracy1,2,3,4,5,6. We inform these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes. In the context of the 2024 US presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, we assigned participants randomly to have a conversation with an AI model that advocated... We observed significant treatment effects on candidate preference that are larger than typically observed from traditional video advertisements7,8,9. We also document large persuasion effects on Massachusetts residents’ support for a ballot measure legalizing psychedelics. Examining the persuasion strategies9 used by the models indicates that they persuade with relevant facts and evidence, rather than using sophisticated psychological persuasion techniques.

Not all facts and evidence presented, however, were accurate; across all three countries, the AI models advocating for candidates on the political right made more inaccurate claims. Together, these findings highlight the potential for AI to influence voters and the important role it might play in future elections. 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 Earlier in the year, an AI-generated clone of President Biden's voice in a campaign robocall captured the public's attention about what generative artificial intelligence is capable of.

But while it can be used to manufacture evidence of things that didn't happen, the main use of AI in U.S. political campaigns this year appears to have been to generate memes and visual commentary. After Hurricane Helene made landfall, images made with artificial intelligence of suffering people and pets proliferated online, some of which were used to criticize the Biden administration. In the days after former President Donald Trump amplified a hateful false claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, AI-generated images portraying Trump protecting animals spread on social media, gaining a large number of... Even though users quickly flagged some of the images as being AI-generated, at least some of the prominent political figures who shared the images said it didn't matter to them. "It's a form of political propaganda, a way to signal interest and support for a candidate, almost like in a fandom kind of style," said Renée DiResta, a professor at the McCourt School of...

"The political campaigns then can pick it up, can retweet it, can boost it and are then seen as being sort of in on the conversation, maybe in on the joke themselves." There's an arms race underway between the latest generative AI tools and detection technology. So far, the detection tools' reliability varies, and researchers say the public needs to rely on forensic experts to tell whether a piece of media is authentic or synthetic. Content made with generative artificial intelligence has been used in American politics. Generative AI has increased the efficiency with which political candidates were able to raise money by analyzing donor data and identifying possible donors and target audiences.[1][clarification needed] A Democratic consultant working for Dean Phillips has admitted to using AI to generate a robocall which used Joe Biden's voice to discourage voter participation.[2]

In April 2023, the Republican National Committee released an attack ad made entirely with AI-generated images depicting a dystopian future under Joe Biden's re-election.[3] In August 2024, The Atlantic noted that AI slop was becoming associated with the political right in the United States, who were using it for shitposting and engagement farming on social media, with the...

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