Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.
The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist, Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and messaging channels.
A would-be autocrat could use such swarms to persuade populations to accept cancelled elections or overturn results, they said, amid predictions the technology could be deployed at scale by the time of the US presidential election in 2028.
The warnings, published today in Science, come alongside calls for coordinated global action to counter the risk, including “swarm scanners” and watermarked content to counter AI-run misinformation campaigns. Early versions of AI-powered influence operations have been used in the 2024 elections in Taiwan, India and Indonesia.
“A disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents,” the authors said. “These systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities and fabricating consensus efficiently. By adaptively mimicking human social dynamics, they threaten democracy.”
One leading expert in propaganda technology, Inga Trauthig, said the adoption of such advanced technology is likely to be slowed by politicians’ reluctance to cede campaign control to AIs. Another cause for skepticism is concern that using such illicit techniques would not be worth the risk, given voters are still more influenced by offline material.
The experts behind the warning include New York University’s Gary Marcus, a prominent sceptic about the claimed potential of current AI models who calls himself a “generative AI realist”, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, who has warned: “Those in the pay of authoritarian forces are undermining electoral processes, weaponizing AI and employing our societal strengths against us.”
Others include David Garcia, professor for social and behavioural data science at the University of Konstanz, Sander van der Linden, a misinformation expert and director of Cambridge University’s social decision-making lab, and Christopher Summerfield, AI researcher and professor of cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University.
Together they say political leaders could deploy almost limitless numbers of AIs to masquerade as humans online and precisely infiltrate communities, learn their foibles over time and use increasingly convincing and carefully tailored falsehoods, to change population-wide opinions.
The threat is being supercharged by advances in AIs’ ability to pick up on the tone and content of discourse. They are increasingly able to mimic human dynamics, for example, by using appropriate…
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