Dr. Susan Leavy:

I am one of the senior advisers on that report. We are going into the next phase of it. The report is probably old already even though it was just released. It is important to pay attention to two areas in the report. The disagreement among AI experts is often about what AI could do in the future, but in the meanwhile we are dealing with things right here, right now that are happening and it is important to separate out those two. There is the social impact right now and there is the daydream about what might happen. Nobody really knows.

The two areas for me, which are linked, are the information ecosystem and AI and democracy. The information ecosystem is through recommender algorithms. With the polarisation we are seeing, people may be sent different things and there is also the potential for AI-generated content so that scope is there. The report outlines the possibility for malicious actors to interfere and generate AI content, which could be super-personalised, to sway people’s beliefs or voting patterns and polarise people and that undermines democracy. That is the one that keeps me awake at night. The AI-generated content on social media has not been shown to have had an effect yet in elections. However, we know that political polarisation in society coincides with the proliferation of recommender systems, which is not very advanced but it is the AI we all use most. In addressing that we have the Digital Services Act. Again, it is about implementation and looking at the regulation we have already and making sure that it works.