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Algorithms Are Coming for Democracy—but It's Not All Bad

Beyond the deepfakes and disinformation, the potential for AI to make politics more accessible and equitable cannot be ignored.

AI doesn’t need to be superior to human experts to augment the labor of an overworked canvasser, or to write ad copy similar to that of a junior campaign staffer or volunteer. In 2024, a US presidential candidate with virtually zero name recognition, Jason Palmer, beat Joe Biden in a very small electorate, the American Samoan primary, by using AI-generated messaging and an online AI avatar. Introducing new dependencies can also lead to brittleness: Exploiting gains from automation can mean dropping human oversight, and chaos results when critical computer systems go down.

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