Election campaigns in the age of artificial intelligence, what changes?

An article by Francesco Berlucchi

Do you remember Garry Kasparov? Those with a few white hairs probably have memories of his long string of titles, first as world champion of the International Chess Federation, from 1985 to 1993, then as world champion of the Professional Chess Federation founded by Kasparov himself, until 2000. Those who are younger and belong to the "Game Boy generation" may remember him for the video game Virtual Kasparov, developed for the Playstation and, indeed, for the Game Boy Advance. Even the very young may have recently seen him mentioned by the newspapers, because Russia has recently included Kasparov, who is an opponent of Vladimir Putin and has lived in the United States since 2013, in the list of people declared "terrorists and extremists".

The former chess player, however, is known to the general public for having been the protagonist, in 1996, of the first challenge in history between man and machine to the sound of moves on the chessboard. "The world champion prevailed, 5 to 1, but the news was different: the computer had won a game," said Francesco Verderami, columnist for Corriere della Sera, during the event "Electoral campaigns in the era of Artificial Intelligence" which opened the new cycle "Humane Intelligence. Turning Artificial Intelligence into a Positive Technology." The series of meetings is promoted by the Humane Technology Lab (HTLab), the Laboratory of Università Cattolica, directed by Giuseppe Riva, which aims to investigate the relationship between human experience and technology.

In moderating the first of these events, introduced by Antonella Marchetti, director of the Department of Psychology and member of the Scientific Council of HTLab, Verderami points out that, starting from that strange game of chess, "within ten years computers were able to bring man to irrelevance. But computers today have been overtaken by a self-taught algorithm, owned by Google, which has given birth to new winning chess theories, and many chess champions have retired. So if the algorithm takes power, and "sneaks into politics," the Corriere columnist asks, is there nothing left for anyone? How is it possible to "stop the wind?"  

To answer the question, it is important to know the compass rose of politics and democracy, where they blow from and with what intensity. "In the last fifteen years, the Western electorate, especially the Italian one, has different characteristics than in the past," explains Damiano Palano, director of the Department of Political Science at Università Cattolica and Polidemos, the Center for the Study of Democracy and Political Change. "It is an electorate that is distracted and distrustful of politics and the fact that politics can intervene in a decisive way in personal life. Paradoxically, however, the voter remains highly polarized, with his own identity anchorage. And this is something that anyone who builds an election campaign has to deal with." In this context, artificial intelligence is "a tool for building increasingly effective campaigns capable of mobilizing voters," because "the amount of data on which it can work is enormous and constantly expanding."

In addition to "political actors", then, it is also necessary to consider "other actors with different interests, for example those who aim at the destabilization of democracies". Because "it's one thing to use artificial intelligence to produce content that meets voters, it's another thing to produce fake content that weakens the credibility of a political leader." How can all this, Palano asks , be limited by legislative instruments? To cool down the excessive pessimism, the director of Polidemos concludes, "we must keep in mind that humans often tend to be frightened by innovations, but after some time, like Ennio Flaiano's Martian, they will have understood how it works." 

"Artificial intelligence is generative and conversational, that is, it simulates a dialogue," explains Antonio Palmieri, president of the Pensiero Solido Foundation. "We tend to anthropoform reality. The machine calculates which word is the most likely to be sequenced. Human beings tend to associate with what is similar to them. Artificial intelligence works if we decide we want to use it." The danger, therefore, is "the de-responsibility of man," because "in this way we build what Julio Velasco calls the culture of alibis, a great alibi that distances us from democracy if we think that algorithms win anyway."

In other words, says Palmieri, the "vision of the absolute deterministic power of algorithms" is wrong because "it erases the enormous possibility that each of us has of being able to play his or her own game." This is also true in the age of generative and conversational AI. A new era in which we are only at the beginning. "There are 'bad guys', but we've always been there," says Palmieri. "Just as there have been and will be attempts to pollute the elections, what changes are the tools. But each of us remains the author of his or her own destiny." Even the digital one. 

The interview is published on Secondo Tempo.