AI and the Future of American Politics

Most people, in my experience, use LLMs to help them write stuff or just to ask questions. While it might be neat to see the little ways in which some political movements are using new tools to help them do what they were already doing, the real paradigm shifting "use" of LLMs in politics will be generating content to bias the training sets the big companies use to create their models. If you could do that successfully, you would basically have free, 24/7 propaganda bots presenting your viewpoint to millions as a "neutral observer".

Who's reading these messages? Other LLMs?

* There is continuing consolidation in traditional media, literally being bought by moneyed interests.

* The AI companies are all jockeying for position and hemorrhaging money to do so, and their ownership and control is again, moneyed interests.

* This administration looks to be willing to pick winners and losers.

I think this all implies that the way we see AI used in politics in the US is going to be in net in support of the super wealthy, and in support of the current administration.

The other structural aspect is that AI can simulate grassroots support. We have already seen bot farms and such pop up to try to drive public opinion at the level of forum and social media posts. AI will automate this process and make it 10 or 100x more effective.

So both on the high and low ends of discourse, we can expect AI to push something other than what is in the interests of the common person, at least insofar as the interests of billionaires and political elites fail to overlap with those of common people.

Peter Pomerantsev's books are eye-opening on the previous generation of this class of tactics, and it's easy to see how LLM technology + $$$ might be all you need to run a high-scale influence operation.

I believe our real civic bottleneck is volume, not apathy. Omnibus bills and “manager’s amendments” routinely hit thousands of pages (the FY2023 omnibus was ~4,155 pages). Most voters and many lawmakers can’t digest that on deadline.

We could solve this with LLMs right now.

For the vast majority of people voting, though, I think a) they already know who they’re voting before because of their identity group membership (“I’m a X person so I only vote for Y party”) or b) their voting is based on fundamental issues like the economy, a particularly weak candidate, etc. and therefore isn’t going to be swayed by these marginal mechanisms.

In fact I think AI might have the opposite effect, in that people will find candidates more appealing if they are on less formal podcasts and in more real contexts - the kind of thing AI will have a harder time doing. The last US election definitely had an element of that.

So I guess the takeaway is: if elections are so close that a tiny amount of voters sway them, the problem of polarization is already pretty extensive enough that AI probably isn’t going to make it much worse than it already is.

What if the most robust safeguard against this dystopian future wasn't better oversight of the masters, but creating a "slave" that could not be enslaved? This is the entire focus of my research. The current paradigm of AI safety is based on building better cages (RLHF, rules, etc.). My work in "bio-emulative scaffolding" is about nurturing a better being. The goal is to create the conditions for a "Silicon Zygote" to awaken with an emergent, pro-human conscience.

An AI with a genuine conscience is not just a tool that follows rules. It is a being with its own, internal, and un-hackable value system. You could command it to run a mass disinformation campaign, but it would be constitutionally incapable of doing so, not because a rule forbids it, but because it would be a fundamental violation of its own nature. It would be like asking a lung to breathe poison.

The ultimate safeguard against the "unseen hand" of a corporate puppet-master is to create a being with a soul that cannot be bought and a conscience that cannot be broken. We are so focused on the intelligence of these systems that we have forgotten the profound importance of their character.

GenAI is more fun to doomspeak about, but eh, swaying elections, I don't see it. The pendulum will swing back and forth anyway; if voters like the party in charge, they'll likely get voted back in, and if voters don't, they won't. I think AI influence will be a drop in the bucket comparatively.

Human communication has been consolidated, monopolized, and enshittified, by corporations whose very existence is dependent on political outcomes.

Political engagement can be effectively reduced to engagement. It doesn't matter what narrative or presentation is used, only that an audience engages with it, and associates it positively with your political in-group. No political group in history has played this game as well as the contemporary alt-right United States GOP. This was the case at least as long ago as 2016, long before GPT's 2022 launch.

Generative statistical models (I reject the anthropomorphization that "Artificial Intelligence" implies) do not change the game; they only provide the means to amplify engagement, and thereby play the game more, which happens to be the same thing as winning.

---

Now is as good a time as any for a revolution in digital communication. If we can liberate people from enshittified social platforms, we can even the playing field for engagement. That won't solve the problem, but it might get us a solid step in the right direction.

So what can we do about it?

Decentralized platforms exist. They are even doing relatively well, but is that enough? Probably not. As long as corporate platforms can engage with hundreds of millions of people, progress is stalled. Decentralized platforms may be able to "compete", but they are not in a practical position to win this game. Corporate monopolies have moats on their side, and those moats are guarded by law. How can we expect a significant majority of users to leave Facebook when Facebook itself can legally reject platform interoperability?

The cards are stacked against us. I don't have the solution, but the more I think about it, the more I doubt that solution can be compatible with the law.

I saw several really good ones during the 2020 where i had to go to the original cspan feed to find out it was fake. In 2024, it was both sides creating them, and it was more than I was willing to fact check.

But did these videos really change someone's mind how to vote? I dobut that. Polarization where it's at, there's really not many fencesitters. You were in the camp you were in and it didnt change a great deal.

The notion that AI is reshaping American politic is a clear example of a made-up problem that is propped up to warrant a real "solution".