Article: How Might AI Sway the Ballots This Year?

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Every election cycle throughout the history of democracy has felt the effects of technological advances to change the candidates’ relationship with the voters. Now, AI will do the same. The introduction of the printing press, the expansion of literacy, and the availability of cheap paper ushered in the newspaper, creating a direct connection between the opinions of writers and the reading public. Direct connection through newspapers to readers scaled the reach of political opinions far beyond public oration by politicians as a means of swaying public opinion and voter sentiment. As communication technology has advanced from newspapers to radio, telephones, television, the internet, social media, and now artificial intelligence, the power to express political opinions and target individual voters with political messages has vastly expanded over the past two centuries.

In past US Presidential election cycles, technology use has played a role in deciding close races for the White House. According to a case study published by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the historic victory of President Obama over John McCain on November 8, 2008 depended in part on Obama’s team’s campaign strategy to use social media to empower volunteers and rally supporters. (gsb.stanford.edu) The case study notes that Obama’s team gathered over 15 million supporters across multiple platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. Obama held 23 times more followers on Twitter than McCain. Later, in the 2016 presidential battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Trump’s team worked with the now infamous company Cambridge Analytica, which promised to use social media and sophisticated big data tools to target individual voters with tailored messages. (npr.org) Using Facebook’s, at the time, lax data rules and an app that requires sign-in through Facebook, Cambridge Analytica acquired personal data as well as friend network information on thousands of Americans. Such information promised better fundraising and reaching undecided voters. The illegal use of personal data led to the closing of Cambridge Analytica in 2018. More recently, news sources have indicated that the RNC has embraced large language models like ChatGPT and image generation models like DALL-E to generate content and videos in near real time to events in the presidential primaries. According to the Washington Post, the RNC produced a synthetic video of President Biden and VP Harris victorious in 2024, followed by dystopian images of terrible things that would happen if Biden won. 

The cost and time of producing synthetic videos and stories have tumbled with the invention of GPTs and other LLMs. Without the need to write copy and work with film producers, political strategists can respond with unprecedented speed to the changing landscape of the election process. Additionally, AI researchers have worked to build tools to predict changes in public opinion and identify the key messages and events that will move public opinion. In a recent publication in the journal Entropy, researchers deploy complex AI tools to generate a constantly evolving prediction of the directions of public opinion that takes in new information about external factors such as economic indices, political events, and more to predict changes in public opinion. (mpdi.com) The latest technology trends indicate that the coming election cycle will undoubtedly feel the impact of generative AI with the high-speed production of information and opinions targeted to individuals.   Look carefully at the information you receive on social media platforms and think critically about the messages and where they came from to make up your mind better.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.