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Technology

Is the CEO of OpenAI right to be worried about AI’s impact on politics?

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the firm behind ChatGPT), has warned of the potential impact of artificial intelligence on political campaigning:

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the responses have highlight the irony of him being a leading light in creating something he’s now nervous about:

But however ironic his nerves may be, are they justified?

One of the features of much punditry of the potential impact of a new technology is that it’s common to neglect the lessons from similar situations in the past. It’s easy (rightly so in many cases) to mock the pessimism of past reactions to new technologies. But that can produce an over-reaction, a dismissal of the value of the past in providing clues for what might happen next.

With personalised 1:1 persuasion in political campaigning, there are plenty of clues from the past. Most recently, from the doubts that sober analysis produce about how effective Cambridge Analytica really was. Lots of fears, lots of coverage, rather less evidence.

Going further back, even to before the rise of the internet, produces more clues, and more doubts, too. Because the idea that increasingly individualised communications will lead to worse sort of politics has been a feature from at least the rise of direct mail (and I suspect before then too).

The risks are meant to be either that individualised communications can in some way play with our psychologies in nefarious ways and/or that politicians being able to say different things to different people is a route to hypocrisy and unaccountability. (As opposed to a route to greater interest in politics because what people hear reflects more what concerns them most.)

What’s notably missing is good evidence that these fears were born out either by direct mail or the other waves of personalised 1-to-1 communications that technology has opened up since, including email and social media.

For example:

In this context, AI is nothing new. It’s just another way of doing something that people have always worried about but haven’t shown is a problem. Now if only there was well-paid enthusiast in this area with a team of experts behind them who could fund some further research…

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