Humanity is on the cusp of a new stage in human evolution, which will have a profound effect on society and democracy. One could call it the ‘Era of Generative AI’—an epoch in which humanity’s relationship with machines will change the very framework of society. Navigating this period of immense change, with both the opportunities and risks that it engenders, will be one of the biggest challenges for both democracy and society in this century.
Research into how the development of a new type of AI, so-called ‘Generative AI’, will impact humanity has been taking place for the last decade. The clue as to why this type of AI is so extraordinary is in its name: an emerging field of machine learning that allows machines to ‘generate’ or create new data or things that did not exist before.
The medium of this new data is any digital format. AI can create everything from synthetic audio to images, text and video. In its application, Generative AI can be conceived of as a turbo engine for all information and knowledge. AI will increasingly be used to not only create all digital content, but also as an automation layer to drive forward the production of all human intelligent and creative activity.
Picture a creative partner capable of writing riveting stories, composing enchanting music or designing breathtaking visual art. Now imagine this partner as an AI model—a tool that learns from the vast repository of digitized human knowledge, constantly refining its abilities to bring our most ambitious dreams to life.
This is Generative AI: a digital virtuoso that captures the nuances of human intelligence and applies this to create something new and awe-inspiring, or new and terrifying. Through tapping into the power of deep learning techniques and neural networks, Generative AI transcends traditional programming, effectively enabling machines to think, learn and adapt like never before.
This AI revolution is already becoming a fundamental feature of the digital ecosystem, seamlessly deployed into the physical and digital infrastructure of the internet, social media, and smartphones. Nevertheless, while Generative AI has been in the realm of the possible for less than a decade, it was only last November that it hit the mainstream. The release of ChatGPT—a large language model (an AI system that can interpret and generate text) application—was an inflection point.
ChatGPT is now the most popular application of all time. It hit 100 million users within two months and currently averages over 100 million users per month. Almost everyone has a ChatGPT story, from the students using it to write their essays to the doctor using it to summarize patient notes. While there is huge excitement around Generative AI, it is simultaneously raising critical concerns around information integrity and brings into question our collective capacity to adapt to the pace of change.
From Deepfakes to Generative AI
The digital ecosystem that has been built over the past 30 years (underpinned by the internet, social media, and smartphones) has become an essential ecosystem for business, communication, geopolitics, and daily life. While the utopian dream of the Information Age has delivered, its darker underbelly has also become increasingly evident.
This ecosystem has empowered bad actors to engage in crime and political operations far more effectively and with impunity. Cybercrime is predicted to cost the world $10 trillion CAD in 2023. If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime would be the world’s third-largest economy after the US and China.
However, it is not only malicious actors that cause harm in this ecosystem. The sheer volume of information to deal with, and humans’ inability to interpret it, also have a dangerous effect. This is a phenomenon known as ‘censorship through noise’: when there is so much ‘stuff’ that one cannot distinguish or determine which messages one should be listening to.
All this was top of mind when encountering AI-generated content for the first time in 2017. As the possibility of using AI to create novel data became increasingly viable, enthusiasts started to use this technology to create ‘deepfakes’. A deepfake has come to mean an AI-generated piece of content that simulates someone saying or doing something they never did. Although fake, it looks and sounds authentic.
The ability for AI to clone people’s identities—but more importantly, to generate synthetic content across all forms of digital medium (video, audio, text, images)—is a revolutionary development. This is not merely about AI being used to make fake content—the implications are far more profound. In this new paradigm, AI will be used to power the production of all information.
Information Integrity and Existential Risk
In the 2020 book, Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse , it is argued that the advent of AI-generated content would pose serious and existential risks, not only to individuals and businesses, but to democracy itself. Indeed, in the three years since this book was published, humans have begun to encounter swathes of AI-generated content ‘in the wild’.
In early 2022, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Zelensky, urging his army to surrender, emerged on social media. If this message had been released at a vitally important moment of the Ukrainian resistance, it could have been devastating. While the video was quickly debunked, this example of weaponized synthetic content is a harbinger of things to come.
Deepfake identity scams—like the one in which crypto scammers impersonated Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk—made more than $2.3 million (CAD) in six months in 2021, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Meanwhile, a new type of fraud (dubbed ‘Phantom Fraud’), in which scammers use deepfake identities to accrue debt and launder money, has already resulted in losses of roughly $4.5 billion (CAD).
Moreover, it is not only that every individual can become a victim of a deepfake attack. Cumulatively, the proliferation of AI-generated content has a profound effect on digital trust. Society was already struggling with the health of the information ecosystem before AI came into the equation—but what does it mean for democracy, and society, if everything humans consume online—the main diet feeding humans’ brains—can be generated by artificial intelligence? How will humans know what to trust? How will they differentiate between authentic and synthetic content?
Safeguarding the integrity of the information ecosystem is a fundamental priority not only for democracy, but also for society as a whole. Not only can everything be ‘faked’ by AI, but the fact that AI can now ‘synthesize’ any digital content also means that authentic content (for example, a video documenting a human rights abuse or a politician accepting a bribe) can be decried as ‘synthetic’ or ‘AI-generated’—a phenomenon known as ‘the Liar’s Dividend’.
The core risk to democracy is a future in which AI is used as an engine to power all information and knowledge—consequently degrading trust in the medium of digital information itself.
However, democracy (and society) cannot function if we cannot find a medium of information and communication that society can all agree to trust. It is therefore vital that society gets serious about information integrity, as AI becomes a core part of the information ecosystem.
Solutions: Authentication of Information
There are both technical and ‘societal’ ways in which to do this. One of the most promising approaches is the idea of content authentication. Rather than trying to ‘detect’ everything that is made by AI (which will be futile if AI drives all information creation in the future), the architecture of ‘authentication’ is embedded into the framework of the internet itself. This should be created with a cryptographic marker so its origin and mode of creation (whether it was made by AI or not) can always be verified. This kind of cryptography is embedded in the ‘DNA’ of the content, so it is more than just a watermark—it is baked in and cannot be removed or faked.
However, simply ‘signing’ this way is not enough. Society must also adopt an open standard to allow that ‘DNA’ or mark of authentication to be seen whenever humans engage with content across the internet—whether on email, YouTube, or social media. This open standard for media authentication is already being developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA, C2PA.org) a non-profit organization focused on content provenance and authentication, which counts the BBC, Microsoft, Adobe and Intel among its members.
Ultimately, this approach is about radical transparency in information. Rather than adjudicating the ‘truth’ (a fool’s errand), it is about allowing everyone to make their own trust decisions based on context. Just as one wants to see the label that indicates what went into the food one is eating, society needs to have the digital infrastructure in place that will allow its members to determine how to judge or trust online information that fuels almost every single decision individuals make.
Building Societal Resilience
However, the challenge cannot come down to technology alone. Society can build the tools for signing content, and the open standard to verify information across the internet, but the bigger challenge is understanding that humanity stands on the precipice of a very different world—one in which exponential technologies are going to change the very framework of society.
This means that old ways of thinking need to be updated. Our analogue systems are no longer fit for purpose. We must reconceptualize what it means to be a citizen of a vibrant democracy, and understanding is the first step. Ultimately, this is not a story about technology—this is a story about humanity.
While the recent advances in AI have kicked off much discussion about the advent of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI)—the point at which machines take over as they become smarter than humans—society is not there (yet). Humans still have the agency to decide how AI is integrated into our society, and that is their responsibility. As a democracy, this challenge is one of the most important of our time—let us not squander our chance to get it right.
