“Living in an Alternate Reality”: Prof. Hany Farid Delves Into How AI Deepened the Partisan Divide This Election Season

This was the year that artificial intelligence was expected to wreak havoc on elections.

For two years, experts from D.C. to Silicon Valley warned that rapid advances in the technology would turbocharge misinformation, propaganda and hate speech. That, they worried, could undermine the democratic process and possibly skew the outcome of the presidential election.

Those worst fears haven’t been realized — but other fears have been. AI seems to have done less to shape how people voted and far more to erode their faith in reality. The new tool of partisan propaganda amplified satire, false political narratives and hate speech to entrench partisan beliefs rather than change minds, according to interviews and data from misinformation analysts and AI experts...

“Did AI change the election? No,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies digital propaganda and misinformation. “But as a society now, we’re living in an alternate reality… We’re disagreeing on if two-plus-two is four...”