Exploring AI Threats to Electoral Integrity

2024 will be a landmark election year in at least two ways. First, more than a quarter of the countries in the world, representing a third of global population, and comprising several of the largest democracies, including Indonesia, India, and the United States, will cast ballots. Second, this will be the first large election cycle since the release of a new suite of advanced AI tools and systems that enable the generation of text, images, sound and video, and will potentially change the landscape of political communication and behavior in profound ways, including through so-called hallucinations, deep fakes and voice cloning. In the face of these challenges, we have deep information asymmetries and a critical need for transparent broad-scale testing of AI in real-world scenarios. This panel will explore known and unknown threats to election integrity and introduce a new initiative, the AI Democracy Projects, that aims to publicly benchmark the performance of AI chatbots that are becoming a popular source of public information.

Join AI Democracy Projects founders–award-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and Alondra Nelson, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who led the development of the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, and the Honorable Francisco V. Aguilar, Nevada Secretary of State, for a conversation with SIPA Lecturer Camille François about the potential risks and benefits to the US election ecosystem presented by AI, and how policymakers, AI experts, and journalists can begin to test AI tools for electoral-information integrity in a way that provides education, information, and accountability to the public.

This event is cosponsored by the Institute of Global Politics (IGP) at Columbia SIPA and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School

About the Institute of Global Politics (IGP) at Columbia SIPA

The Institute of Global Politics (IGP) convenes leading scholars and practitioners to advance policy solutions to today’s pressing global challenges. IGP brings together experts—from the public and private sectors and across the political spectrum—to foster civil discourse and create evidence-based policy strategies for local to global impact.

About the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School

Established in 2012, the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute is a collaboration between Columbia and Stanford Universities, designed to encourage and support new endeavors in media innovation. Our partnership operates as an academic venture forum focusing on three distinct areas: granting, offering over $1M in grants each year to support innovative media projects by students, faculty, and alums; research and teaching, providing technical instruction to students and to the community; and research and development, where our Local News Lab develops AI-powered tools to assist local newsrooms.

Speakers:

• Julia Angwin, award-winning investigative journalist; founder of Proof News; best-selling author; contributing writer, New York Times Opinion; and Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
• Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study; Distinguished Fellow, Center for American Progress; former Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
• Francisco “Cisco” V. Aguilar, Nevada Secretary of State; former General Counsel for Agassi Graf and the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education; former Special Counsel to the Chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Moderator: 

Camille François, IGP Affiliated Faculty

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