AI could sway the 2024 elections, campaign pros say — but not like you think

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by Samuel Pordengerg May 29, 2023 News
AI could sway the 2024 elections, campaign pros say — but not like you think

Artificial intelligence could give the early masters of the technology a huge advantage in the upcoming elections.

The ability to quickly and cheaply create deceptive audio and video has troubling implications for a political system already beset by misinformation. How can voters hold politicians accountable if they don't know what they're talking about? How will the campaign professionals respond when their candidates are accused of plagiarizing?

Political consultants say they are more excited about the potential of generative artificial intelligence to tackle boring grunt work and expand their ability to deploy big-race tactics in down-ballot contests, despite the widespread anxiety over deepfakes.

Tom Newhouse is vice president of digital marketing at a Republican advertising and consulting firm. It will be improving fundraising capabilities by better targeting, whether that is location targeting, income, hobbies or habits, giving campaigns with up-to-date voter data, more personalized advertising, or messages.

There are many small campaigns that can potentially leverage the tools to save time, but also to create content that may not have been possible otherwise.

Campaign professionals across the country are racing to see how they can use the new machine-learning tools to improve their work in advance of the presidential elections in 2020.

The incoming president of the American Association of Political Consultants said that anyone who wants to do their job better here is trying to see how the tool can benefit their work.

According to the election pros that CQ Roll Call spoke to, the use of artificial intelligence is expected to give some candidates a leg up.

According to Newhouse, campaigns that can innovate and lean into these tactics will have a strategic advantage.

A survey of the history of technology and politics shows that the earliest people to use it benefited the most.

Roosevelt was not the first president to address the nation by radio. Unlike his predecessors who either orated into the microphone as if delivering a whistle-stop speech or read their remarks like a sixth graders in front of the classroom, FDR's weekly fireside chats were delivered as if the listener were sitting beside him.

Mussolini took control of the Italian radio stations as he consolidated power, while Gobbels commissioned and subsidized cheaper radio receivers to further the reach of Hitler.

The preferred medium of mass communication was television. President Eisenhower hired an ad agency to advise his campaign and broadcasted his news conferences. The election of 1960 was decided by the first televised presidential debate, where voters who watched on TV preferred a youthful and tan John F. Kennedy to a sweaty, sallow Richard Nixon. After learning from his mistake, Nixon embraced TV and hired an entire team of Madison Avenue executives and TV producers to run his campaign. Nixon was dependent on a television studio the way a person with a disease relied on a lung.

New technologies gave politicians a new way to use them. Ronald Reagan was helped by the work of Richard Viguerie. Donald Trump's team benefited from Cambridge Analytica's mining of voters' social media data, while Barack Obama's campaigns expanded on that data-driven work to organize grassroots enthusiasm into an army of volunteers.

Newhouse described campaigns as "laboratories of innovation."

Newhouse believes that electioneering may lead the corporate sector to adopt artificial intelligence. He said that political campaigns will be incentivized to use technology quicker than in the private market.

Politics is using artificial intelligence. After President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee released an artificial intelligence video that imagined a future without him. A fake account pretending to be a local news outlet posted a fake video on the eve of the election pretending to be Paul Vallas. Machine-learning models have been used by campaigns to guide their ad buys.

It is possible to use large language models to update voter files, perform data analysis and program automated functions in the near future. Colin Strother, a Democratic political consultant based in Texas, said that smaller campaigns rarely have the ability to hire data scientists. That will be changed by the use of artificial intelligence.

Strother said that unless you're on a big-time campaign with a lot of money and a lot of staff, you can't afford brute work.

Strother thinks that artificial intelligence will allow campaigns to speed up their response times. instantaneous rebuttals to anything they say in a speech, debate or campaign ad could be churned out by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.

He expects campaigns to use artificial intelligence to update voter databases and send tailored communications to different groups of voters. Those could be persuasive pitches to undecided independents on the issues that matter most to them, or they could be appeals to stronger supporters of the candidate who loses. Strother said, "If you can automate all of that, then these previously time- intensive, labor- intensive and therefore cash- intensive campaign functions get a lot easier to do and a lot cheaper to accomplish."

There is a leveling of the playing field between rich and poor campaigns. One of his clients was portrayed as a superhero in a video created by his agency. The kind of project that would have required renting out a studio with green screens, blocking off hours of the client's time and hiring some computer animation and editors to put it all together was created "for fun" in no time at all.

The proliferation of high-end video editing software and improved cameras has made it possible for a candidate for town dogcatcher to put together a slick campaign ad even if they can't afford it. The trend will only get better with the help of artificial intelligence.

He said that some examples of content and video graphics images will be able to be used for leaner campaigns.

For most voters, the rise of artificial intelligence doesn't mean being bombarded by hard-to-spot political lies so much as just being bombarded by political content in general. The history of technology's impact on work suggests campaigns will be able to do more with less, and thus will make more of the election stuff that inundates and annoys voters.

A recent report in The New York Times showed how 527 groups targeted conservatives using computer-generated audio to raise $89 million supposedly to support cops, firefighters and veterans, but almost all of the money went into the pockets of the groups themselves.

Campaign professionals are worried about the potential for bad actors to abuse artificial intelligence.

Strother was concerned that it would be used for evil.

Newhouse said he was excited from a professional point of view. It is difficult to not be concerned that the trends of the last decade are going to continue as far as the voters are concerned.

AAPC released a policy statement forbidding its members from using generative artificial intelligence to make false statements. The trade group's ethical standards are not always followed by operatives. Some campaigns will be expected to implement things that are not good for campaigns and not good for democracy. There will be a lot of campaigns in the year 2000. It would be foolish to ignore that possibility.

Strother is concerned that the more moderate voters who don't view politics as an extension of their social identity will be turned off by the chaos created by Artificial Intelligence. They will bail if we create homework for them that requires them to figure out which one of us is telling the truth and which one of us is lying.

Artificial intelligence is largely unregulated. The Federal Election Campaign Act's disclosure rules for TV and radio advertising "I support this message" should be extended to online content if it uses artificial intelligence. When you think about our adversaries that have been messing with our elections, this is another tool that they can access, knowing that we're vulnerable in an open society.

Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer has met with some of the senators who have introduced similar legislation.

Congress hasn't passed legislation regulating how social media companies use user data. Artificial intelligence is more capable of generating election-swaying deceptions than social media is. At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing last week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., opened his remarks by playing a recording of his own voice reading a script that was created by an artificial intelligence program. Republicans were receptive to the idea of a new federal agency to regulate artificial intelligence.

Even if Congress acts quickly, there are questions about how much help it will give.

The prevalence of dark money political groups, the First Amendment's broad protections of political speech and the fact that defamation lawsuits take years to resolve themselves, could potentially avoid any liability by hiding behind the organization's corporate veil. Strother said that it opened the door for some really nasty stuff.

The desire to maintain a socially held belief is one of the reasons why people are prone to logical hiccups. Confirmation basis is when we accept information that confirms our prior beliefs, while rejecting data that is not in line with them. Fact checking may not be enough to get rid of that fantasy once a false conviction is set.

A majority of Republican primary voters believe the 2020 elections were stolen, despite hundreds of court cases, audits and media reports showing otherwise. A computer-generated recording of President Joe Biden admitting to a plot wouldn't need to be effective. It isn't hard to convince the faithful that devils are around.

There may be overblown concerns over artificial intelligence. Political deepfakes have been funnier than bad. Uncertainty over the technology's potential for good or ill is caused by the rapid advancement of the technology. Political consultants are experimenting the most with artificial intelligence, but are still concerned about its drawbacks.

Newhouse doesn't make predictions on the impact of artificial intelligence without a caveat.

You would probably get a blank stare if we talked about this technology in the past. It is difficult to say what the future will look like for the November 2024 elections.