by Sylvester Brown Jr. | The St. Louis American
Many Americans, especially those current on social media trends – are familiar with artificial intelligence (AI).
The term refers to the simulation or emulation of human intelligence. AI today is used across various industries including movies, music, journalism, healthcare, and finance. With the use of computer-enhanced learning it can create content, predict financial outcomes, help develop new drugs, diagnose diseases, replicate images of actors, and create songs that sound like real musical artists.
Just ask artists, Drake or The Weeknd. Recently an anonymous TikTok-er used AI to create a catchy song with a beat, lyrics and voices that fooled many online users into believing the artists had released a new pop song.
The rapid rise of AI technology has been greeted with enthusiasm, indifference or, in some cases, great alarm. With the 2024 elections starting soon, many in political arenas are concerned that AI will be used to control or influence how people vote. Others warn that the new high-tech tool will be used to suppress Black votes.
During the Nov. 1, 2023 “AI Safety Summit” in London, England, Vice President Kamala Harris promoted President Biden’s Executive Order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”
During her speech at the London Embassy, Harris warned against AI-enabled disinformation and misinformation tools that cannot discern between fact and fiction.
“For democracies, AI has to be in service of the public interest,” Harris stressed. “We see the ways AI poses a threat to Americans every day, certainly in politics and we are laying the foundation for an international framework to regulate AI.”
A Brookings Institute report lauded Biden’s executive order defining it as a “promising starting point for a top-down approach to these new technologies.” However, the report ended with an ominous warning about next year’s elections…and not just for Black voters:
“Anti-democratic actors and autocrats will seek every opportunity to shake confidence in democracy, targeting the systems that ensure free and fair elections and good governance.”
An article titled: “Artificial Intelligence Could Impact Black Voting During 2024 Elections: Black Leaders Call for Safeguards Against,” written by Barrington M. Salmon(TriceEdneyWire.com) audaciously warns that AI could become the modern-day tool once used by segregationists to once again deny African Americans their right to vote.
Just as racists used “the courts, local and state laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, fraud, brute force, violence and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan to impede and prevent Black people from exercising their constitutional right,”Salmon wrote, adding: “in the 21st century, voter suppression has gone high-tech with the same characters still plotting to control who votes, when and how.”
To emphasize his thesis, Salmon detailed recent congressional testimonies of Melanie Campbell, president & CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and Damon T. Hewitt, president, and executive director of The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to demonstrate how AI has and will poison the “electoral ecosystem.”
Campbell, according to Salmon, spoke about the urgent need to create federal safeguards and legislation to “protect against the technology’s misuse as it relates to elections, democracy, and voter education, while fighting back against the increasing threats surrounding targeted misinformation and disinformation.”
Both Campbell and Hewitt expressed concerns about how AI-generated misinformation targeting Blacks will grow worse leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
Salmon quoted Hewitt’s congressional argument where he stated that voting rights and technology are inextricably linked.
“Voters of color already face disproportionate barriers to the ballot box that makes it more difficult and more costly for them to vote without factoring in the large and growing cost of targeted disinformation on our communities,” Hewitt said.
The gist of Campbell and Hewitt’s testimonies revolved around the idea that AI could be used to exacerbate already fragile conditions for Black voters. They referenced a lawsuit against just two perpetrators during the 2020 elections who had sent 85,000 disinformation robocalls targeting Black voters in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“The spread of misinformation and disinformation online to influence elections and disenfranchise voters, often specifically Black voters, is already commonplace,” Hewitt argued. “Communities of color who already sacrifice so much to cast a ballot and make our democracy work are increasingly subjected to new downsides of technological innovation without reaping the rewards.”
Exacting “race” from the equation, most US adults believe AI will add massive misinformation to next year’s elections. A poll released last month by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that “6 in 10 adults (58%) think AI tools— which can micro-target political audiences, mass produce persuasive messages, and generate realistic fake images and videos in seconds — will increase the spread of false and misleading information during next year’s elections.”
In October the St. Louis Press Club hosted its “In the Now”conversationfeaturing Dr. Kim William Gordon, head of EDTECH Research Labs and Dr. Art Silverblatt, Webster University’s professor emeritus, and internationally known media literacy educator to address the burgeoning, evolving and revolutionary technology of AI.
The experts were more positive than negative about the impact of AI in society. The men who have co-authored papers on the topic argued that the technological innovation will indeed impact lives and careers but concluded that artificial intelligence is basically an inception of “a new species” that can be an essential ally in the effort to promote and maintain a trustworthy media environment.
The Brookings Institute came to a similar but more cautionary assumption last month in its report: “AI has many opportunities to democratize the campaign playing field, but it could also turbocharge preexisting election interference tactics.”
Noting how AI has already altered the way candidates for elected office conduct their campaigns, the report argued that the technology presents “opportunities and risks at every stage leading up to Election Day.”
On a positive note, according to Brookings, AI could revamp election administration processes to make them more efficient, reliable, and secure;” it could identify anomalies in voter lists and machines that could preempt fraud and it could scan paper ballots more quickly than poll workers, thereby reducing the time necessary to report election results or to conduct recounts.
On the negative side, the report notes that AI “can generate phishing attacks,” use partisan biases to “clean up” voter rolls by disproportionately targeting minority voters and can be used “to further suppress and disenfranchise voters by disseminating misinformation or disinformation, particularly to less-informed citizens who may be more vulnerable to baseless election fraud narratives.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.
This article originally appeared in the St. Louis American
