Images of Donald Trump being arrested by cops on the streets of New York. A video showing the apocalyptic future of the United States if Joe Biden wins a second term as President. A statement from King Felipe VI apologizing to the Catalans for not being neutral in the 2017 independence referendum. A dialogue between a Mexican candidate and Benjamin Franklin about the border situation between their countries.
All this content has two things in common: it was officially used by candidates or parties in campaigns or in political messages this year and it was all created with artificial intelligence (AI). It is a small snippet of the influence that this additive technology is beginning to have in the political discourse, and which will certainly increase in Latin America as the presidential elections in Argentina and Ecuador, the second round in Guatemala, the regional elections in Colombia and the internal processes for electing presidential candidates in Mexico draw near. All of this will happen before the end of 2023.
Will this be the AI election or do we still have to wait to see the potential scope of this technology? Will its impact continue to be limited to flashy videos broadcast officially or unofficially on social networks, or will there be new proposals?
In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to assess the current extent of AI deployment in Latin America and it is interesting to examine the data from a recent report published by HelloSafe. According to the study, the challenge of the pandemic has led the private sector in the region to bet heavily on AI from 2021 onwards. Half of Colombian companies are already using these tools, as are 49% of Peruvian companies, 41% of Argentine and Brazilian companies and 40% of Mexican companies. Strikingly, 6 out of 10 companies that have adopted this technology have done so for marketing and development of services such as contact center automation. That is, for functions that require direct or indirect communication with the client.
Taking this data into account and considering aspects that directly affect the electorate, the use of AI can also be expected to improve chats, which make it possible to publicize party and candidate proposals and encourage them to support them. It is clear that innovations will not be uniform across the region. Most advances are concentrated in countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, where Internet penetration and the influence of digital communications are more pronounced than in other areas.
inner change
So far we’ve seen examples of elements that directly affect the voter, but AI is also bringing changes in the dynamics and workings of campaigns that will have important consequences.
Next year we will certainly see great progress in this direction in the presidential elections in the United States. There, the Democratic and Republican parties are already using these tools to simplify tedious and complex data mining tasks. The goal is to identify donors and voters better and faster, and to discover behavioral patterns that can be exploited to boost donations and support. And just as the 2016 Donald Trump campaign revolutionized microtargeting with the questionable advice of Cambridge Analytica, we’ll soon see just how far the new tools can go.
But beyond data analysis, AI can also transform campaign teams by automating important, time-consuming tasks like creating large volumes of social media posts or suggested speeches. ChatGPT is able to suggest a draft of a short speech in seconds. Obviously the results are not ideal. They are depersonalized, contain significant prejudice and lack humanity.
The disproportionate use and lack of care and refinement of these tools can stifle the creativity and inventiveness that characterize human intelligence, but there’s no denying that the agility they enable, when well calibrated, can help candidates with much smaller budgets and teams engage more effectively with well-known and better-funded personalities in the future.
The ethical challenge
All of the issues we have raised pose a significant ethical challenge. How do you ensure that AI-powered deep fakes do not lead to false reports designed to mislead the electorate? Do the new data mining practices present a new challenge for the protection of personal data?
Following the release of Republicans’ doomsday video of Biden’s second term, Democrats brought a bill to Congress to force the labeling of AI-powered tags. This is a good first step, but there are certainly many more to come.
Communication – and especially politics – is about our attention. It is the scarce commodity: a second, a minute, an hour, a day… cannot grow. Our attention span is extremely limited in the face of the enormous, overcrowded and extremely competitive supply of information vying for our time, thanks to powerful audience fixation mechanisms thanks to sophisticated algorithms: the most valuable and scarce commodity.
In this highly contentious battle, AI has the ability to program itself to create a perfect osmosis between our desires and behaviors and the information it can provide us with. We went from asking questions to interacting with programs that reproduce sensations and artificial humanization environments. And offer us a pleasant, non-critical and individual relationship, capable of creating perfect bubbles.
In addition, AI has tremendous predictive capacity and can be used efficiently and deeply to predict voting behavior. This power can change the allocation of resources and energies to focus all strategic and persuasive efforts on the contested voters (who have doubts about whether or not to vote, or for whom); border (which can switch between two nearby options); of transfer (that in second-round voting systems they must vote for a different option that was not their first choice).
Democracy and electoral processes in Latin America face extraordinary challenges caused by AI. Unless regulation sufficiently constrains them, we will see large and massive experiments in intervention to condition or enforce narratives and strategies. AI must be prevented from turning democracy into a laboratory for guinea pigs, replacing free will with deep manipulation of will and criteria.
Antoni Gutierrez Rubi He is a communications consultant. @antonigr