One particularly concerning application of AI is its use in political ads, which both Democrats and Republicans agree should be banned.
Take, for example, the potential to automate misinformation. In 2018, a former employee of consulting firm Cambridge Analytica disclosed that the company had used psychographic profiles based on surveys of millions of Facebook users to create ads designed to assist Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, among other political campaigns. At the time, the operation described seemed large and sophisticated, but with generative AI today, such an operation could potentially be automated — and if financed by super PAC money, largely untraceable.
Generative AI is particularly adept at creating content based on simple prompts, including that which might appeal to someone based on publicly available profiles or information from voter databases. With the right instructions and parameters, and millions of dollars, the automation of targeted political ads could very well be a hallmark of the upcoming 2024 presidential elections.
Naturally, the potential for AI to exacerbate misinformation is vast, barring proper regulation.
Broad regulation could also dampen innovation
On the other side of the coin, AI models have the potential to be greatly beneficial. Consumers’ concerns are rooted in fear about the worst future that AI could lead to, and a strong desire to rein in AI development could hamper promising areas of AI innovation. Particularly in science, advances in machine learning models (that we colloquially call AI) are helping unearth new discoveries at an extremely rapid clip.
One positive application grounded in the here and now involves the advanced machine learning models that could solve hugely consequential and complex problems in the medical field. In fact, AI models are solving 50-year-old protein-folding problems in as little as half an hour, entirely revolutionizing research in the field and allowing for a greater understanding of genetic diseases. In this case, AI is not just a tool but potentially the key to finding the underlying causes of diseases and creating cures that have eluded scientists for decades.
These applications are not lost on people. Currently, AI applications in health care are among the most interesting forward-looking technologies to consumers, according to Morning Consult tracking. This is also an area where most U.S. adults — Democrats and Republicans alike — feel that genetic and medical data should be used to help train models, albeit with regulation. Gen Z adults and millennials in particular feel that training models using this data should be not only allowed, but unregulated as well.
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