AI is starting to wear down democracy
Free and easy to use, AI tools have generated a flood of fake photos and videos of candidates or supporters saying things they did not or appearing in places they were not — all spread with the relative impunity of anonymity online.
The technology has amplified social and partisan divisions and bolstered anti-government sentiment, especially on the far-right, which has surged in recent elections in Germany, Poland and Portugal.
In Romania, a Russian influence operation using AI tainted the first round of last year's presidential election, according to government officials. A court there nullified that result, forcing a new vote last month and bringing a new wave of fabrications. It was the first major election in which AI played a decisive role in the outcome. It is unlikely to be the last.
As the technology improves, officials and experts warn, it is undermining faith in electoral integrity and eroding the political consensus necessary for democratic societies to function.
Madalina Botan, a professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania's capital, Bucharest, said there was no question that the technology was already 'being used for obviously malevolent purposes' to manipulate voters.
'These mechanics are so sophisticated that they truly managed to get a piece of content to go very viral in a very limited amount of time,' she said. 'What can compete with this?' In the unusually concentrated wave of elections that took place in 2024, AI was used in more than 80%, according to the International Panel on the Information Environment, an independent organisation of scientists based in Switzerland. It documented 215 instances of AI in elections that year, based on government statements, research and news reports. Already this year, AI has played a role in at least nine more major elections, from Canada to Australia. Not all uses were nefarious. In 25 per cent of the cases the panel surveyed, candidates used AI for themselves, relying on it to translate speeches and platforms into local dialects and to identify blocs of voters to reach. In India, the practice of cloning candidates became commonplace — 'not only to reach voters, but also to motivate party workers,' according to a study by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.
At the same time, however, dozens of deepfakes — photographs or videos that re-create real people — used AI to clone voices of candidates or news broadcasts. According to the International Panel on the Information Environment's survey, AI was characterised as having a harmful role in 69 per cent of the cases.
There were numerous malign examples in last year's US presidential election, prompting public warnings by officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.
Under Trump, the agencies have dismantled the teams that led those efforts.
The most intensive deceptive uses of AI have come from autocratic countries seeking to interfere in elections outside their borders, like Russia and China. The technology has allowed them to amplify support for candidates more pliant to their worldview — or simply to discredit the idea of democratic governance itself as an inferior political system.
One Russian campaign tried to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment before last month's presidential election in Poland, where many Ukrainian refugees have relocated. It created fake videos that suggested the Ukrainians were planning attacks to disrupt the voting.
In previous elections, foreign efforts were cumbersome and costly. They relied on workers in troll farms to generate accounts and content on social media, often using stilted language and cultural malapropisms.
With AI, these efforts can be done at a speed and on a scale that were unimaginable when broadcast media and newspapers were the main sources of political news.
— The New York Times
By Stuart A. Thompson and Steven Lee Myers
The authors write on misinformation for NYT
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