Understanding the Role of GenAI in Elections: A Crucial Endeavor for 2024

In 2024 alone, over 70 countries are holding national elections, making it a pivotal year for democracies around the globe. With the rise of generative AI, there's a pressing need to understand its impact on the integrity and fairness of electoral processes. For instance, research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that misinformation campaigns powered by AI can spread up to six times faster than factual news. Also, a recent study done by the AI Democracy Projects - a collaboration between Proof News and the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study led by Alondra Nelson shows that a majority of AI models’ responses to questions voters might ask were inaccurate, incomplete or even harmful. The implications for voter behavior and election outcomes are profound, necessitating thorough investigation.

Project Goals

1. Mapping the Field: Analyzing the global electoral landscape from the past year, the role of generative AI from the electoral campaigns to the elections, as well as the frameworks in place to mitigate the risks.
2. Learning from Elections around the globe:Drawing insights from elections worldwide in 2024 to understand how GenAI can influence – negatively or positively – electoral processes.
   
3. Countering Mis/Disinformation: Identifying strategies to mitigate the risks of misinformation and disinformation in the electoral context, with a focus on the upcoming German election in 2025.

About Amélie Hennemann-Heldt

Dr. Amélie Hennemann-Heldt brings a wealth of expertise from her distinguished career in digital policy and media research. She joined the German Federal Chancellery in 2022 and serves as the deputy head of division ‘General Digital Policy Issues’.

Prior to this, she worked as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) and was associated with the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. She was also a lecturer in fundamental and human rights at the Berlin School of Economics and Law and at the University of Jena. Amélie completed fellowships with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the Center for Cyber, Law & Policy at Haifa University, and the Weizenbaum-Institute.

In her research, she focused on platform regulation, social media governance, the impact of new technologies on the digital public sphere, and the exercise of fundamental rights in the context of algorithmic decision-making and autonomous systems. She co-founded the HBI Digital Disinformation Hub and co-edited a volume on the constitutionalization of social media. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined the horizontal effect of freedom of expression on social media platforms. 

Fellowship of Practice in Collaboration with our Labs

As Fellow of Practice, Amélie will collaborate with the Civic Machines Lab led by Orestis Papkyriakopoulos, the Content Moderation Lab led by Yannis Theocharis, and various members of the GenAI Task Force, to delve into the impacts of GenAI on elections.