Electoral Campaigns in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What Changes?

An article by Francesco Berlucchi

Do you remember Garry Kasparov? Those with a few grey hairs likely recall his long string of titles, first as the World Chess Federation champion from 1985 to 1993, then as the world champion of the Professional Chess Association founded by Kasparov himself, until 2000. Younger people, part of the "Game Boy generation," might remember him from the video game Virtual Kasparov, developed for the PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance. Even the very young might have recently seen him mentioned in the news, as Russia recently listed Kasparov, an opponent of Vladimir Putin living in the United States since 2013, as a "terrorist and extremist."

The former chess player is widely known for being the protagonist, in 1996, of the first-ever man versus machine chess match. "The world champion won, 5 to 1, but the real news was that the computer had won a game," recounts Francesco Verderami, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, during the event "Electoral Campaigns in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," which opened the new series "Humane Intelligence: Transforming Artificial Intelligence into Positive Technology." This series of events is promoted by the Humane Technology Lab (HTLab), the Laboratory of the Università Cattolica, directed by Giuseppe Riva, which aims to investigate the relationship between human experience and technology.

While moderating the first of these events, introduced by Antonella Marchetti, director of the Department of Psychology and member of the HTLab Scientific Council, Verderami emphasized that starting from that peculiar chess match, "within ten years, computers were able to render humans irrelevant. But today, computers have been surpassed by a self-learning algorithm owned by Google, which has developed new winning chess theories, leading many chess champions to retire." So, if the algorithm takes power and "sneaks into politics," asks the Corriere columnist, is there no chance for anyone else? How is it possible to "stop the wind?"

To answer this question, it is important to understand the political and democratic landscape, where the winds blow from and with what intensity. "In the last fifteen years, the Western electorate, particularly the Italian one, has different characteristics compared to the past," explains Damiano Palano, director of the Department of Political Science at the Università Cattolica and of Polidemos, the Center for the Study of Democracy and Political Changes. "It is a distracted and disillusioned electorate regarding politics and the ability of politics to significantly impact personal life. Paradoxically, however, the voter remains strongly polarized, with a strong identity anchorage. This is an element that anyone building an electoral campaign must reckon with." In this context, artificial intelligence is "a tool to build increasingly effective campaigns capable of mobilizing voters," because "the amount of data it can work on is enormous and continuously expanding."

Besides the "political actors," we must also consider "other actors with different interests, such as those aiming to destabilize democracies." Because "it’s one thing to use artificial intelligence to produce content that appeals to voters, it's another thing to produce false content that undermines the credibility of a political leader." How, then, asks Palano, can this be limited with legislative tools? To cool down excessive pessimism, the director of Polidemos concludes, "we must remember that humans often tend to be scared of innovations, but after some time, like the Martian in Ennio Flaiano's story, they will understand how it works."

"Artificial intelligence is generative and conversational, meaning it simulates a dialogue," explains Antonio Palmieri, president of the Solid Thought Foundation. "We tend to anthropomorphize reality. The machine calculates the most probable word to put in sequence. Humans tend to aggregate with what is similar to them. Artificial intelligence works if we decide we want to use it." The danger, then, is "the de-responsibilization of man," because "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 will inevitably win."

In other words, Palmieri says, the "vision of the absolute deterministic power of algorithms" is wrong because "it erases the enormous possibility each of us has to play our game." This applies even in the era of generative and conversational artificial intelligence. A new era in which we are just at the beginning. "The 'bad guys' exist, but we have always existed," Palmieri concludes. "Just as there have always been and will be attempts to tamper with elections, what changes are the tools. But each of us remains the author of our own destiny." Even the digital one.

The interview is published on Secondo Tempo.