Will artificial intelligence weaken democracy? – Fast company
By Next Big Idea Club | Published: 2025-11-04 09:00:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders share five key takeaways from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How Artificial Intelligence will Change Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.
Bruce is an expert in security technology, and teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. He is also a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and head of security engineering at Inrupt, Inc.
Nathan is a data scientist at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. He focuses on making policymaking more participatory, and his research includes machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more.
What’s the big idea?
AI can be used for or against the public interest within democracies. It has already been used to govern countries around the world, and it is inevitable that it will continue to be used in the future by leaders, policy makers and law enforcers. How AI is linked to democracy today will determine whether it becomes a tool of oppression or empowerment.
1. The global democratizing impact of AI is already profound
It has only been a few years since ChatGPT came into being and the influence of AI has already permeated every democratic process in governments around the world:
- In 2022, a group of artists in Denmark founded the world’s first political party committed to a political platform created by artificial intelligence.
- Also in 2022, South Korean politicians running for president were the first to use AI avatars to communicate with voters en masse.
- In 2023, a Brazilian local legislator passed the first ever law written by Amnesty International.
- In 2024, a US federal court judge began using artificial intelligence to interpret the plain meaning of words in US law.
- Also in 2024, the Biden administration unveiled more than two thousand separate use cases for artificial intelligence across US federal government agencies.
Examples illustrate the diverse uses of AI across citizenship, politics, legislation, the judiciary and executive management.
Not all of these uses will create lasting change. Some of these will be one-offs. Some of them are small in nature. Some of them were propaganda stunts. But each use case speaks to a shifting balance between supply and demand, which will increasingly be mediated by AI.
Legislators need help drafting bills, and their staff resources are limited, especially at the local and state levels. Historically, they have looked to lobbyists and interest groups for help. Increasingly, it is becoming easier for them to use an AI tool.
2. The first places where AI will be used are places where there is the least amount of public oversight
Many cases of using AI in governance and politics have explicit objections. Some of them make us uncomfortable, especially when we are in the hands of autocrats or ideological extremists.
In some cases, policy will be a regulatory force to prevent dangerous uses of AI. Massachusetts has banned the use of facial recognition AI in law enforcement due to real concerns expressed by the public about their tendency to encode racial bias into systems.
Some of the uses we think may be most impactful are unlikely to be quickly adopted due to legitimate concerns about their potential for error, introducing bias, or subverting human agency. AI systems can be citizen enablers, acting as voting agents to help us influence larger numbers of more complex ballot initiatives, but we know that many will object to anything that comes close to giving AI the right to vote.
“The thousands of uncovered uses of AI in government are likely just the tip of the iceberg.”
But AI will continue to be rapidly adopted in some aspects of democracy, regardless of the feelings of the general public. People within democracies, even those in government positions, often enjoy considerable autonomy. They don’t have to ask anyone if it’s okay to use AI, and they will use it if they see that it benefits them. The Brazilian city councilor, who used artificial intelligence to draft a bill, did not ask anyone for permission. A US federal judge who used artificial intelligence to help him interpret the law didn’t have to review anyone first. The Trump administration appears to be using AI for everything from drafting tariff policies to writing public health reports – with some obvious drawbacks.
The thousands of AI uses uncovered in government are likely just the tip of the iceberg. These are just the apps that governments have seen fit to share; Those they believe are the best examined, most likely to survive, or perhaps least controversial to disclose.
3. Elites and autocrats will use AI to concentrate power
Many Westerners point to China as a cautionary tale about how AI can enable authoritarianism, but the truth is that AI provides structural advantages to entrenched power in democratic governments as well. The nature of automation is that it gives those at the top of the power structure more control over actions taken at lower levels.
It is notoriously difficult for new elected leaders to exert their will over the many layers of human bureaucracy. The civil service is large, unwieldy and chaotic. But it would be trivial for any executive to change the parameters and instructions of the AI model used to automate government systems.
The AI dynamics affecting the concentration of power extend beyond government agencies
Over the past five years, Ohio has undertaken a project to comprehensively review its administrative code using artificial intelligence. The leaders of this project framed it in terms of efficiency and good governance: eliminating millions of words that are outdated, unnecessary, or redundant. The same technology could be applied to further more ideological ends, such as purging all legal language that places burdens on companies, neglects corporate accountability, protects a certain group of people, or fails to protect others.
Whether you like or hate automating these policies will depend on whether you stand with or oppose those in power, which is the important point. AI gives any faction in power the ability to exercise more control over the levers of government.
4. Regulators will find ways to use AI to distribute energy instead
We don’t have to resign ourselves to a world where artificial intelligence makes the rich richer and the elite more powerful. This is technology that can also be used by outsiders to help level the playing field.
In politics, AI gives entry-level, local candidates access to skills and the ability to do work at a scale once available only to well-funded campaigns. In the 2024 cycle, congressional candidates running against incumbents like Glenn Cook in Georgia and Shamaine Daniels in Pennsylvania have used artificial intelligence to help themselves be everywhere at once. They have used AI to make personalized automated calls to voters, write recurring blog posts, and even create audio files in the candidate’s voice. In Japan, a candidate for Tokyo governor used an artificial intelligence-powered avatar to answer more than 8,000 online questions from voters.
“We do not have to resign ourselves to a world where artificial intelligence makes the rich richer and the elite more powerful.”
Beyond public policy, labor organizers are also leveraging AI to build power. The Worker’s Lab is an American non-profit organization that develops assistive technologies for labor unions, such as AI-powered apps that help service workers report workplace safety violations. The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike is a blueprint for organizers. They have received perks from Hollywood studios that protect their members from being displaced by AI, while also receiving guarantees of their ability to use AI as enablers for their own benefit.
5. The ultimate democratizing impact of AI depends on us
If you’re passionate about AI and see the potential to make life, and perhaps even democracy, better around the world, know that there are plenty of people who don’t feel the same way.
If you are troubled about the ways in which you see AI being used and concerned about the future it will lead to, know that the path we are on now is not the only path available.
AI technology by itself does not pose an inherent threat to citizens, workers, and the public interest. Like other democratic technologies – voting processes, legislative districts, judicial review – their effects will depend on how they are developed, who controls them, and how they are used.
Voters of democracies must do four things:
- repair That the technology ecosystem is more trustworthy, such that AI is developed with more transparency, more guardrails around exploitative use of data, and public oversight.
- Resists Inappropriate uses of AI in government and politics, such as facial recognition technologies that automate surveillance and encode inequality.
- Responsible use AI in government can help improve outcomes, such as making government more accessible to people through translation and accelerating administrative decision-making processes.
- renewalGovernment systems are as vulnerable to the disruptive potential of superhuman AI capabilities as political advertising rules that never anticipated deepfakes.
These four elements are how we can revamp our democracy in a way that applies AI to truly advance the public good.
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club Magazine and reprinted with permission.
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(Tags for translation) artificial intelligence
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