We research AI election threats. Here’s what we need to prepare for | Samuel Woolley and Dean Jackson

Artificial intelligence endangers democracy - but it's less about specific deepfakes and more about a bigger transformation

We study AI and democracy. We're worried about 2050, not 2026.

Half of humanity lives in countries that held national elections last year. Experts warned that those contests might be derailed by a flood of undetectable, deceptive AI-generated content. Yet what arrived was a wave of AI slop: ubiquitous, low quality, and sometimes misleading, but rarely if ever decisive at the polls. Still, given the outcome of the US presidential election, few observers concerned about democracy felt relief. The immediate, prolonged challenges brought by the second Trump administration make it difficult to do much more than react to crises as they happen.

Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Dean Jackson is a senior fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's CTRL Lab, a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press and the principal of Public Circle LLC, a research consultancy on technology and democracy issues