AI is an exciting but disruptive technology. It’s newest disruption might be the information published during our upcoming elections.

If you didn’t know, there is a Municipal Election this year. That includes a few districts and the office of Mayor. Expect to see a bunch of signs popping up in your neighborhoods. Add on top of that the buzz of a contested and dramatic national election, we have a busy year ahead of us.

The topic of technology interrupting elections is not new. “Fake news” is something that we’ve been dealing with since the internet gained initial momentum and as social media rocketed to the mainstream. The issue with AI is the speed and believability at which it can create and disseminate believable content.

Not long ago, the internet was flooded with NSFW photos of a famous county/pop star that I bet you could “swiftly” guess. Many people thought they were real and just that small snafu caused a lot of news and havoc.

Our entire democracy is based on the human right to evaluate, judge, and vote on our elected officials. Many people vote along partisan lines, but elections are often won by undecided swing voters. However, fake news can also create another issue- voter suppression. If you can stop a voter, that’s basically the same as swinging them. Voter suppression isn’t just about physically preventing people from voting like we had 50 years ago. A quick read on the Wikipedia page will show a multitude of modern suppression tactics: disenfranchisement, day-of experience, subversion, and intimidation.

This is not a subject that I know is fun or happy, but let me remind a true and simple fact: your greatest responsibility as a citizen is to be a well-informed and participatory voter. If you have citizenship, no amount of posts or pushes can stop any person in 2024 from a right we established in 1776.

However, it would be naive to say that attempts at suppression are entirely ineffective. What are the risks that AI poses to our democratic responsibilities? Let me share a couple of examples.

Eloquent Arguments

We cannot make the assumption that any side of a political argument is incapable of persuasion. The power of large language models like ChatGPT is that bad writers can become good, and good writers can become great. The ability to write and argue a statement or point of view is easier than ever before so intelligent argument alone cannot be a factor of truth.

Image Generation

No matter if it is a mayor or a president, there are hundreds of unregulated, unchecked image generators on the internet. Someone could post a photo of a road and add in potholes. “The city doesn’t care about our streets!” Or you could have our president in a dark alleyway speaking to an enemy of the state.

Audio Generation

Currently, it takes less than 4 minutes to replicate someone’s voice. If you have a voice-over on a video, you can’t assume that it is a quote or even real at all. OpenAI said they have a technology that can copy a voice with as little as 15 seconds. That is not available to the public, on purpose.

Video Generation

Even more nefarious is a future in which we will need to question if video is real. If you have not seen the highlight reel of OpenAI’s new video technology, you need to watch Sora on YouTube. It is not released to the public. From the discussion I’ve seen in the AI circles, it’s being assumed that they don’t want to be blamed for election issues.

This all begs the reiteration of the need to fact-check. If you only see it on one site or post, that’s not enough proof. Check the site of the politician. It is also good to check sites like Snopes. It’s important to your own personal online reputation that you don’t post false information. I personally don’t repost things anymore unless I have checked multiple sources first.

So how will we know fact from fiction?

This is definitely a fear that many people are beginning to harbor. Should I share anything anymore? Is my identity safe? How will I know what is true?

Luckily, there is definitely conversation on this subject, though not as much as one would hope. The problem is that the same people making the tech are also offering solutions. Is it a coincidence that Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, also owns a company called World Coin that uses blockchain technology to prove your humanness? Probably not.

Funny enough, I do think blockchain technology (you may have heard of one of them called Bitcoin) is the answer to this issue. In the future, we may need to release articles, video, audio and more on a blockchain ledger that only we can access and write to via a private network and password. This would then have a code associated with that piece of content that others could verify came from you.

The natural evolution of this technology would be that politicians would need to publish to this blockchain to show what they have or have not said or done. However, this kind of tech does not yet exist.

So whether you are voting for the next municipal officials of Huntsville or the next president of the United States, check the facts and make your informed decision. Democracy still works, but only if WE put in the work.