This policy brief is part of CIGI’s project on freedom of thought: Legitimate Influence or Unlawful Manipulation? Find out more at: www.cigionline.org/fot
Policy Brief No. 12 — February 2025
Generative AI, Democracy and Human Rights David Evan Harris and Aaron Shull
Key Points → Disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining electoral integrity are expected to play an ever larger role in elections due to the increased availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can produce high-quality synthetic text, audio, images and videos and their potential for targeted personalization. → As these campaigns become more sophisticated and manipulative, the foreseeable consequence is further erosion of trust in institutions and heightened disintegration of civic integrity, jeopardizing a host of human rights, including electoral rights and the right to freedom of thought. → These developments are occurring at a time when the companies that create the fabric of digital society should be investing heavily in, but instead are dismantling, the “integrity” or “trust and safety” teams that counter these threats. → Policy makers must hold AI companies liable for the harms caused or facilitated by their products that could have been reasonably foreseen. They should act quickly to ban using AI to impersonate real people or organizations, and require the use of watermarking or other provenance tools to allow people to differentiate between AI‑generated and authentic content.
Introduction The 2024 US presidential election gave an unexpectedly decisive win to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. However, throughout the election season, beginning in the primaries (Nehamas 2023; Swenson and Weissert 2024; Powell 2024) and running through the final days of the campaign, US intelligence agencies (Thrush 2024) and large tech companies (AI Elections Accord 2024) warned that foreign actors were attacking the election online and weaponizing AI technologies in new ways. The election, and others around the world in 2024 (European Commission 2024) and 2023 (Meaker 2023), have been subject to disinformation campaigns and influence operations unlike any others in human history (Allyn 2024). Disinformation is not new, and neither are influence operations run by foreign states. But one thing has changed since the 2016 electoral gauntlet: the rise of generative AI tools. Large language models, most commonly known for being the technology underlying the ChatGPT chatbot, have stormed to the forefront of public consciousness. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first chatbot to reach largescale public adoption. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT reached its first one million users in five days when it launched in November 2022. This same milestone took ChatGPT’s contemporaries, Instagram and Netflix, 2.5 months and 3.5 years, respectively (Hu 2023). This success has not gone unnoticed and today there is a plethora of direct competitors to ChatGPT. Google