Thomas Mann House | 7 p.m. (PT)

The arrival of ChatGPT, Midjourney and Dall.E provided artificial intelligence for everyday use. Today, anyone can use generative AI to create texts or images from prompts – without tech expertise and on household devices. Journalists have used automated text production, and we increasingly see cases of AI use in political campaigns. How does this change how citizens get information, trust media, and think about reality? Will AI bring a surge of disinformation and deep fakes or help combat „fake news“ and hate speech? Can AI deepen political polarization and the erosion of the authority of democratic institutions? What role has AI played in the super-election year of 2024, with elections in over 60 countries worldwide?  

The experts on the panel will discuss the good and bad of artificial intelligence, the role of information in democracy, and how democratic societies could and should regulate technology. Who acts through AI, and who is responsible for its effects on democracy? From a transatlantic perspective and informed by current academic research, they ask: Is democracy ready for AI? 

Attendance by invitation only.

Participants

Bruce Bimber is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, where he studies how democracy is affected by computing and media environments. He has written extensively about how the Internet facilitates the formation of political groups both within the mainstream and at the extremes. In recent years, he has turned to the study of democratic erosion, focusing on the role of social media use in people's belief in conspiracy theories and in the spread of populist and illiberal attitudes. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the International Communication Association, and a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is currently working on the use of AI to analyze conspiracy theories and endorsements of political violence in social media content. 

Claes H. de Vreese is Distinguished University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society, with a special focus on media and democracy at the University of Amsterdam. He also holds the Chair in political communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR. His research interests include the role of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence in democratic processes. This includes microtargeting, news recommenders, social media platforms, disinformation, comparative journalism research, the effects of news, and public opinion. He has published a dozen books and more than 250 articles. He is the recipient of the Swanson Career Achievement Award, the NeFCA Career Award, and he is an elected Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the International Communication Association, and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences. 

Ulrike Klinger is Professor for Digital Democracy and member of the Board of Directors of the European New School of Digital Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. She is an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, where she led the research group “News, Campaigns, and the Rationality of Public Discourse” until 2020. She researches digital political communication, technology and power, and the transformation of digital publics.

Julien Labarre is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University Dominguez Hills and an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment, a research initiative launched at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit. He is also the former administrator of the Center for Information Technology & Society. His research focuses on mass media, epistemic problems, extremism, and pathologies of democracy, primarily in the US and France.