News/Commentary

‘Incredibly disruptive’: AI will ‘revolutionize’ 2024 politics and replace American jobs, experts warn

June 2, 2023 | | Print Article

Long after persistent Pandoras opened the artificial intelligence box, people are finally starting to sound the alarm bells in earnest.

In an opinion piece for Fox News, Push Digital Group chief creative officer Brian Athey warns that “AI will revolutionize politics in 2024.”

Athey compares the AI revolution to “performance-enhancing” drugs, writing, “What we’re about to see in the 2024 election cycle, with the introduction of artificial intelligence, is the rise of ‘performance-enhancing digital.'”

“AI will revolutionize politics in the months ahead. Across America, digital agencies and operatives – Democrat and Republican – are already experimenting, and while the outcomes are difficult to predict, the differentiating factor for the winning side will be who best leverages AI to its full potential,” he explains.

With its “extraordinary” ability to “navigate the oceans of data that campaigns produce,” Athey says, AI will be leveraged “as an accelerator, allowing politicos to scale ideas much faster once they’ve brainstormed in the first place and decided to execute them.”

“Copywriting for fundraising emails, captions for social media posts, and scripts for campaign videos can now all be produced with an unprecedented level of speed, personalization and diversity,” he notes.

But there are “downsides” to “AI’s output,” Athey says.

What AI produces lacks “soul.”

Athey explains:

Soul translates to the special nuances that add authenticity, which is how we connect with voters. We’ve become quite clever with tricks to make AI more accurate, but I’m skeptical of any campaign that leans too heavily on AI-produced content. It will likely contribute to lazy, cookie-cutter messaging that diminishes audience perception and engagement. All that does is hurt your fundraising by leaving your brand vulnerable to being labeled contrived and inauthentic.

 

What is more concerning, he says, is the potential for “misinformation, deep fakes and AI-generated imagery.”

“From what I’ve seen firsthand, it won’t be long at all before discerning reality becomes a challenge – in fact, it is happening already,” Athey writes, citing the faux “imprisonment of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin” as examples.

Indeed, as BizPac Review has reported, “deep fake” videos of President Biden in drag promoting Bud Light and former President Donald Trump “starring” in “Better Call Saul” recently went viral.


And following the glitchy Twitter launch of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, Trump posted an AI-generated audio clip of a fake phone call between DeSantis, Trump, billionaire George Soros, Adolf Hitler, World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Devil.


It’s all fun and games, as they say, until Wall Street takes a hit, which is exactly what happened after a fake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon made the social media rounds.


With respect to political candidates, Athey says there is already “a current ethical conundrum.”

“It is acceptable for a political agency to write an email in a candidate’s voice, sign their name and send it to their followers?” he asks. “But what if AI was used to generate the candidate’s script, mimic their voice, and superimpose the words onto pre-captured footage without any visible disclaimers?”

“That’s not science fiction; those tools are available now,” he states. “Where do we draw the line?”

Meanwhile, members of Congress are warning that AI will have a definite impact on the U.S. job market — they just aren’t sure what to do about it.

“I don’t have answers,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Fox News. “There’s no question AI is an incredibly disruptive technology, and we should be closely looking at the implications of it and how best to handle those implications.”

Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) is less concerned with the jobs impact and more worried about the potential threat of artificial intelligence to “national security.”

“New technologies have come and gone, and with them you have displacement, not necessarily jobs lost, but jobs added and jobs shifting,” he said. “For AI, my concern is less with job displacement and more with national security dangers and protecting that national security infrastructure from AI.”

But jobs are definitely on the line — lots of them.

Goldman Sachs recently reported: “Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”

“Extrapolating our estimates globally,” the investment bank continues, “suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.”

According to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), AI is “a danger.”

“I think AI is a danger. It does replace Americans’ jobs,” she told Fox News. “This is where Congress—we have to work harder to figure out how to control this.”

“There’s many dangers to American jobs, not just AI. It’s people coming across the border, competition from other foreign countries,” she continued. “We have to do everything we can to protect American jobs, including against AI.”

“When you’re trying to replace jobs, the American people should be concerned about that,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) agreed. “With AI, I think there’s a lot of stuff that we need to study up on and get to know it very, very fast.”

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Melissa Fine
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