Today we have an essay from Nate Persily titled: Democracy in the Age of AI. Yesterday, Lisa Manheim also published an essay titled: Leaning into AI. Both essays turn out to more optimistic, or at least less pessimistic, than a lot of writing on AI and democracy.

Here’s an excerpt from Nate’s piece:

AI amplifies the abilities of all good and bad actors in the democratic system to achieve the same goals they have always had. That includes purveyors of disinformation or hostile foreign actors who can take advantage of the tools of artificial intelligence to engage in influence operations or even “kinetic” operations, for example, to execute a cyberattack on critical infrastructure.  At the same time, those tools can help election officials more easily convey information to voters or allocate resources more efficiently, and they can lower the cost of campaigning for those who might replace a large staff with AI agents or construct advertisements and other campaign communications (in whatever language they want) at a fraction of the cost consultants now charge…. 

We might later look back on the revolution in AI and realize that “AI’s democracy problems” were inseparable from the other challenges that this new technology poses. If AI leads to massive labor force disruptions or it enables governments to better surveil and censor their populations, those are democracy problems as well. In the end, the best way to realize the upsides and mitigate the downsides of AI for democracy, would be for democracies to ally together to ensure that they continue to lead in AI model development, deployment, and diffusion, and steer this technology toward a pro-democratic future.

And here’s an excerpt from Lisa Manheim’s essay:

So how to move forward? The law should and will still play a role. Preexisting legal restrictions will still apply, for example, to restrict actors even as they seek to exploit new technologies to engage in voter intimidation, voter suppression, impersonation of a candidate, fraud, and so on. There may, moreover, be a role on the margins for newly enacted regulation, particularly with respect to disclosure.

Ultimately, however, the solution to the problem of AI in elections is not likely to be a legal solution. Instead, the path forward might need to be one of acceptance, coupled with a commitment to harnessing AI’s potential to advance pro-democratic ends. On this front, AI-related technology can be an excellent teacher, potentially educating voters about complicated concepts in an accessible way…Leaning into AI for pro-democratic purposes may not be easy or attractive. But like a backburn in a wildfire, it may be what is needed.