Exploring AI Threats to Electoral Integrity

Exploring AI Threats to Electoral Integrity

January 24, 2024, 5-6pm ET 

Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, 420 W 118th Street, Room 1501, New York, NY

In-person or virtual panel discussion, with required registration
 

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, Harold F. Linder 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 livestreamed and registration is free.

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