AI’s Threat to Democracy: The Future is Now
Artisans of disinformation in Russia, China, and elsewhere have worked hard to destabilize democracies for years. With AI now providing them industrial strength powers, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
Two-out-of-three Americans don’t pay much attention to international news or opinionating, including on the problems they and the other 96 percent of humanity share. When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), they just might be excused given the daily deluge of hype, horror, and hope in the stories now filling their news feeds. Surfeited on the subject or not, they’d be wise to tune in Hugo Micheron. The French professor’s focus on AI’s threat to their and other democracies warrants listening up.
Set aside the spotlighted predictions about AI—the ballyhooed productivity gains and the coming scientific and technological breakthroughs that last week helped drive the world’s stock markets to new highs. Micheron is looking at the dark side. An expert on jihadism in Europe, he’s examining how Russia, China, and other revisionist powers as well as the terrorist fringe already are using AI to supercharge their disinformation campaigns targeting western democracies.
Micheron comes well credentialed to cut across geographies and disciplines, not to mention kibbitz on the challenges facing political leaders and policymakers in AI’s brave new world. Having earned his Ph.D. at the École Normale Supérieure and done post-doc work at Princeton and London’s Kings College, he is currently at the School of International Affairs of France’s prestigious Science Po Paris. There, Micheron has launched a program focused on AI, the information ecosystem, technological innovation, and democracy.
Micheron thankfully eschews academese in his English as well as French presentations. His latest book, Anger and Forgetfulness, the Democracies Facing European Jihadism, is about terrorism, but its analysis is relevant to the growing threats in Europe and elsewhere from bad actors across the board. Despite major terrorist takedowns, he asserts, Europe’s governments have misjudged their victories, underestimating the durability of jihadist ideologies and their capacity to mutate to advance their antidemocratic goals.
That’s where AI fits in. Jihadism, Micheron points out, comes in waves. Countering a rising tide of attacks when it happens obviously is crucial. But low tide is just as important as high. It’s then, he argues, that movements reorganize, rework strategies, and most important, reach out to new audiences. In fact, as they recruit adherents, artificial intelligence is equipping the jihadists’ techies with the social media influencers’ most powerful tools.
In an interview earlier this month in the magazine Le Point Micheron put it this way.
“In my research, I can say that Islamist groups…have begun testing generative artificial intelligence. At the time of the social media revolution, it was necessary to have computing power and a big investment to have a strike force. With today’s (AI) revolution…a group of jihadists can create an avatar of (Osama) bin Laden with whom you can have a talk. Marginal groups are going to find themselves with production tools worthy of Hollywood.”
Micheron’s point, however, isn’t only about terrorists’ AI-enabled information warfare. “Europe needs to realize what’s happening right now,” he told Le Point. In social media’s global hothouse, the jihadists aren’t only serving their own cause; they’re adding to the fodder available to Russia, Iran, and others who are stoking clashes on Gaza, Ukraine, and domestic conflicts in Europe in a far broader effort to delegitimize European democracies.
“(Europe’s) enemies aren’t content with carrying out cyberattacks; they’re engaged in a vast smear campaign. It’s become extremely difficult to make a strong European voice heard.” In Micheron’s view, it’s just the beginning. “(Thousands) of language models (programs enabling computers to understand human language) freely available on the Internet are capable of transforming any illiterate person into a gifted propagandist.”
Micheron, of course, isn’t the only one sounding the alarm about AI. Ostensibly angst-ridden, AI’s creators are wringing their hands. So are regulators, political leaders, and the commentariat. Deep fake calls purportedly from President Biden encouraging voters to stay home in the New Hampshire primary rang bells last month. Warnings about AI’s use in the presidential race are proliferating, as are similar fakes and anxieties from Slovakia and Indonesia to India where AI-spawned disinformation already has appeared this year.
Warnings are one thing, actions another. Unfortunately, the usual suspects are producing the usual results. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission are publishing prohibitions on various AI uses and putting rules in place. In Congress, the House has launched a task force to do “research.” And the tech giants, now racing to embed AI in their platforms while opposing bans on AI’s political use, have announced a pact to adopt, as they piously described, “reasonable precautions.”
If Silicon Valley’s billionnaires are worried about the threat to their bottom line from government diktats, they can sleep easy. Marinating in their own disinformation over stolen elections and the media’s anti-conservative bias, the Republicans are doing their election-year best to geld the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The homeland security component reportedly has pulled back from its effort to marshal social media and state election officials to cope with the growing disinformation threat.
And the view from Europe? “Today,” Micheron told Le Point, “we are too content to regulate. We must learn to defend ourselves…. Europe plays acoustic music in the middle of the techno parade that is the information war. Europe may produce the most beautiful music, but no one hears it in the din.”
Substitute the United States for the name of the continent in Micheron’s metaphor and there’s no need to change a word.