Artificial Personas and Democracy

The accelerating power of artificial personas to shape public discourse on mainstream social media poses a huge challenge for democracy.

The de-facto permission of anonymity on mainstream social media, by not requiring or enforcing strong initial identification and authentication of new users, is really available only to criminal states and non-state actors that abuse such platforms. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens' privacy and anonymity are easily breached by corporations, nations and even mid-level criminals that can hack on their devices.

"Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial intelligence-driven text generation and social media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the Internet." wrote recently Bruce Schneier, the most renown IT security expert.

Is there anything we can do to make sure that abuse of AI to manipulate the public discourse - via AI-enhanced deep fakes, click and troll farms, and propaganda campaigns - will no0t demolish whatever is left of our democratic systems?

To what extent can we hope to use and develop AI to sufficiently mitigate, identify and attribute such AI-assisted abuses? Given the inherent complexity of AI systems, wouldn't such systems inevitably become themselves a vulnerability, a black box, albeit compromisable by fewer threat actors?

Paradoxically, near perfect anonymity on mainstream social networks is achievable only by very advanced state and non-state entities engaged in illegally manipulating them. Ordinary citizens, instead, are not only unable to have any meaningful level of anonymity or privacy (even using the best available tools), but are also deeply surveilled and manipulated through social media feeds they cannot control, and micro-targeting ads by legal and disguised entities.

In this scenario, what is the role of radically more secure identification, authentication and processes for our computing devices and social media, so as to raise radically the confidence that a source of information on social media is a really certain human being? 

Of course that would leave out the problem to ascertain what are the motives and incentives of such individual, who may be a foreign spy, undisclosed paid operative of a corporation or political candidate or party, or other entities with an illegal or undisclosed agenda. But this is a lesser problem that we have been dealing with and keeping under check for decades.