Americans need disconnect. Unplug. Shoot the television. It seems impossible. With less than five days until Election Day in the United States, most people can’t help but check the news (or TikTok or X) at least once a day. Swipe, refresh, repeat. By Tuesday, the connection will be constant. Mentally, political stress. takes a huge toll. Since uncertainty can exacerbate anxiety, the 2024 election feels worse than ever. There is a reason for that.
I’m not just talking about the things that are falling from the sky in general: militias on Facebook organizing polling place surveillance, conspiracy theory propagators, cybercriminals potentially waiting in the wings. Some version of those nerves have been around for years. Now, however, there’s a new factor raising users’ blood pressure as they browse: AI misinformation.
American voters are clearly concerned about how misinformation could affect who wins elections, but Sander van der Linden, author of Foolproof: Why misinformation infects our minds and how to build immunitypoints out that anxiety around AI could be more existential. “If you look at the problem from a more indirect perspective, such as sowing doubt and chaos, confusion, undermining democratic discourse, decreasing confidence in the electoral process and confusing undecided voters,” he says. “I think we are facing a greater risk,” one that fuels polarization and erodes the quality of debate.
According to an American Psychological Association survey Published last week, 77 percent of American adults feel some level of stress about the future of the country. It gets worse. Sixty-nine percent of adults surveyed said the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a cause of “significant stress,” a figure that represents an increase from 52 percent in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. . Nearly three-quarters of respondents thought the election could lead to violence; more than half worried it could be “the end of democracy in the United States.”
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Added to all this is the threat of falsehoods generated by AI. For more than a year researchers have warned about electoral misinformation coming from artificial intelligence. Beyond the surveys, this misinformation has played a role in the war between Israel and Hamas and in the war in Ukraine. 404 Media called the aftermath of Hurricane Helene “The ‘fuck’ era of AI-generated garbage.” (In reality) fake news lurks around every corner. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum published a report Claim that misinformation about AI is one of the biggest short-term threats facing the world. Bad election information and fake images can also generate significant revenue for X users, according to a BBC report this week.
