In recent weeks, the United States has been living the presidential elections, which ends on November 3. Elections are the time when people in a country are given the opportunity to decide on their future. Every citizen can take control of the situation and choose the best president for them. As you know, technology and Internet play a huge role in our daily lives today.
In less than a decade, social media have become a threat to a democracy. As we all know, Internet can mobilise a large number of people for political actions. Unfortunately, the Internet can be used to spread false information, affect voting lists or delete votes. If we are not careful, the new world of Artificial Intelligence may become even more dangerous weapon in the years to come.
AI can be used to manipulate individual voters. This is possible by the availability of real-time data on voters, from their behavior on social media to their consumption patterns and relationships. Paranoids receive advertisements with messages based around fear and people with a conservative predilection received advertisements with arguments based on traditions and community. Traces they leave behind on the Internet are used to build unique behavioural and psychographic profiles. The current President Donald Trump, a candidate with flexible campaign promises, is particularly well suited to this tactic. Every voter can receive a message tailored to their needs, the most important thing is to find emotional reasons that will stimulate the person to act.
Another threat are the bots. “With the 2020 election now in progress, researchers are more worried than ever that bots will interfere. The fake accounts have become more sophisticated and harder to detect.” says Emilio Ferrara, a data scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 2016 nearly 19% of all tweets related to the election that year were generated by bots. But then bots used simple strategies that were easy to detect: an active account 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that posts every minute. Nowadays there are artificial intelligence tools that produce human-like language. Humans cannot detect bots that use AI, because they cannot distinguish them from human accounts. These bots survive longer on social-media platforms and can spread disinformation longer. There are usually more human accounts than bots, but around some political events, such as the presidential elections, there are more bots which manipulate information.
What will the future of AI in elections look like?
A survey on the attitudes of Europeans towards technology showed that a quarter of people would prefer if policy decisions were made by AI instead of politicians once elected. This probably shows a growing distrust of citizens towards the government. AI collects data about the nation and creates clear policies.
Can AI be used in politics for a good purpose?
We blame technology for the world’s evil or lost elections, but the truth is that technology itself is not harmful. It is people who use it for bad purposes: manipulating information and misleading people. But technology can support democracy. With the help of the AI, propaganda can be counteracted, and AI can be better used to listen to what people have to say and make sure that their voices and opinions are clearly heard by their elected representatives.
The AI pollster has predicted the chances of a win by Biden or Trump
Polly Pollster, the artificial intelligence pollster that correctly predicted the Liberal’s minority win in the 2019 Canadian election, has found that President Donald Trump has a slim chance of winning the White House this time around. Polly is not a traditional surveyor. In order to predict the results of the elections, artificial intelligence extracts data from social media. The advantage is to get a larger population sample and to eliminate prejudices. People don’t know that they are the sample, so the answers are consistent with their real feelings, unlike traditional questionnaires where people are biased to give answers. Even though Polly correctly predicted the outcome of the previous election, this time she may be wrong. We’ll find out soon enough.
It’s amazing, but at the same time terrifying that technology has developed so much that it knows so much about us that it can predict our choice. AI gets better every day, so we have to be careful not to use it against us.
sources:
https://ai-techpark.com/the-impact-of-ai-on-presidential-elections-2020/