Credit: The Medium
If you’ve ever watched Disney’s Wall-E or Warner Bros’ The Matrix, I’m sure you recall the haunting themes of both — robots taking over humanity. Ever since the introduction of modern technology, people have feared the consequences and potential dystopian future the digital age could create. Most recently, Open AI released Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, a platform that responds to and creates original essays, scripts, stories, and other forms of language and communication. Implications of ChatGPT could potentially spread across every aspect of communication and human life; from education, industries, businesses, and employment, to even politics, society could be permanently changed. Although ChatGPT certainly comes with its benefits, the advanced technology poses serious threats to our democracy and governmental processes that must be considered and understood.
Democracy is established upon the idea that government should be representative of the people and it relies on equal access to information and voting opportunities for it to actually be effective. Lobbying has always been a key part of this process, as lobbyists advocate the needs and wants of the people, while also holding the government accountable by sharing political decisions with citizens. ChatGPT threatens this accountability and representation of all groups of people because artificial intelligence can now act as its own lobbyist, automatically generating articles, reports, emails, blogs, posts, social media comments, and any other form of communication.
In Sanders and Schneier’s Opinion Article “How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy” the authors explain how ChatGPT could target specific people within the government — from Congress members with strong influence over certain policies to even just exposing the weakest points within the government, the possibilities are endless (Sanders and Schneier 2). This type of information can become extremely dangerous too, as people in control of ChatGPT can more easily spread their own ideals and campaigns. Using ChatGPT emails and social media posts, they can gain more insight from within the government, with which they can selectively choose information to disseminate across the media to match their own ideology.
Although it can be argued that ChatGPT has the potential to strengthen democracy by giving a voice to communities with less power and money currently, realistically this most likely would never be the case. As with almost anything throughout history, people with more money will have more control over ChatGPT technology and who can access it. In this way, ChatGPT will actually only increase the power gap between lower and higher social classes.
And what exactly happens when ChatGPT starts generating its own comments, posts, emails, and accounts? It’s starting to sound a little eerie right…maybe like that dystopian world you remember from Wall-E or The Matrix? Although I do believe technology is extremely important and ChatGPT certainly has important benefits, it would be irresponsible to disregard any concerns and preventative measures before this technology becomes too widespread. While it may be difficult to determine exactly what these preventative measures could be, it is truly our civic duty to protect our democracy, which ChatGPT threatens greatly.
Sources
Sanders, Nathan E., and Bruce Schneier. “How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy.” The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2023,
www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/opinion/ai-chatgpt-lobbying-democracy.html. Accessed 24 Aug. 2023.