Affirmative interference. How AI language systems are changing the political public sphere

Regina Kreide (Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen)

The digitalization of everyday life and politics, in particular the use of AI-based systems, is rapidly changing interpersonal communication and has – sometimes unnoticed – significant effects on social processes and our everyday lives. Large technology companies know our purchasing needs long before we do, bots offer to be our “best friends” and “intelligent” language systems replace journalists and “explain” which candidate we should vote for in the next election. The tension that already exists in liberal capitalist democracy between democratic self-determination and capitalist and bureaucratic rule is supplemented by the problem that, although the idea of truth and thus the idea of a general will, which embodies the emancipatory project of democracy, still exists, the tendency towards a post-factual society is increasing in the course of the digital media revolution. In the long term, neither truth nor democracy can withstand this development unscathed. 

The lecture analyzes how AI technologies are designed, what they do and also what they cannot do, in order to assess their potential impact and how they influence communication between people in public. It shows that these programs currently communicate “subserviently” with users and play affirmatively with the political context, thus fitting effortlessly into the context of a growing authoritarian liberalism.