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Could organizations use artificial intelligence language models such as ChatGPT to induce voters to behave in specific ways?

Senator Josh Hawley asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this question in a May 16, 2023, US Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Altman replied that he was indeed concerned that some people might use language models to manipulate, persuade and engage in one-on-one interactions with voters.

Altman did not elaborate, but he might have had something like this scenario in mind. Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc – prevails in an election.

While platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube use forms of AI to get users to spend more time on their sites, Clogger’s AI would have a different objective: to change people’s voting behavior.

How Clogger would work

As a political scientist and a legal scholar who study the intersection of technology and democracy, we believe that something like Clogger could use automation to dramatically increase the scale and potentially the effectiveness of behavior manipulation and microtargeting techniques that political campaigns have used since the early 2000s.

Just as advertisers use your browsing and social media history to individually target commercial and political ads now, Clogger would pay attention to you – and hundreds of millions of other voters – individually.

It would offer three advances over the current state-of-the-art algorithmic behavior manipulation. First, its language model would generate messages — texts, social media and email, perhaps including images and videos — tailored to you personally.

Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate countless unique messages for you personally – and millions for others – over the course of a campaign.

Second, Clogger would use a technique called reinforcement learning to generate a succession of messages that become increasingly more likely to change your vote. Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning, trial-and-error approach in which the computer takes actions and gets feedback about which work better in order to learn how to accomplish an objective.

Machines that can play Go, Chess and many video games better than any human have used reinforcement learning.

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Third, over the course of a campaign, Clogger’s messages could evolve in order to take into account your responses to the machine’s prior dispatches and what it has learned about changing others’ minds. Clogger would be able to carry on dynamic “conversations” with you – and millions of other people – over time. Clogger’s messages would be similar to ads that follow you across different websites and social media.

The nature of AI

Three more features – or bugs – are worth noting.

First, the messages that Clogger sends may or may not be political in content. The machine’s only goal is to maximize vote share, and it would likely devise strategies for achieving this goal that no human campaigner would have thought of.

One possibility is sending likely opponent voters information about nonpolitical passions that they have in sports or entertainment to bury the political messaging they receive.

Another possibility is sending off-putting messages – for example incontinence advertisements – timed to coincide with opponents’ messaging. And another is manipulating voters’ social media friend groups to give the sense that their social circles support its candidate.

Second, Clogger has no regard for truth. Indeed, it has no way of knowing what is true or false. Language model “hallucinations” are not a problem for this machine because its objective is to change your vote, not to provide accurate information.

Third, because it is a black box type of artificial intelligence, people would have no way to know what strategies it uses.

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Clogocracy

If the Republican presidential campaign were to deploy Clogger in 2024, the Democratic campaign would likely be compelled to respond in kind, perhaps with a similar machine. Call it Dogger. If the campaign managers thought that these machines were effective, the presidential contest might well come down to Clogger vs. Dogger, and the winner would be the client of the more effective machine.

Political scientists and pundits would have much to say about why one or the other AI prevailed, but likely no one would really know. The president will have been elected not because his or her policy proposals or political ideas persuaded more Americans, but because he or she had the more effective AI. The content that won the day would have come from an AI focused solely on victory, with no political ideas of its own, rather than from candidates or parties.

In this very important sense, a machine would have won the election rather than a person. The election would no longer be democratic, even though all of the ordinary activities of democracy – the speeches, the ads, the messages, the voting and the counting of votes – will have occurred.

The AI-elected president could then go one of two ways. He or she could use the mantle of election to pursue Republican or Democratic party policies. But because the party ideas may have had little to do with why people voted the way that they did – Clogger and Dogger don’t care about policy views – the president’s actions would not necessarily reflect the will of the voters. Voters would have been manipulated by the AI rather than freely choosing their political leaders and policies.

Another path is for the president to pursue the messages, behaviors and policies that the machine predicts will maximize the chances of reelection. On this path, the president would have no particular platform or agenda beyond maintaining power. The president’s actions, guided by Clogger, would be those most likely to manipulate voters rather than serve their genuine interests or even the president’s own ideology.

Avoiding Clogocracy

It would be possible to avoid AI election manipulation if candidates, campaigns and consultants all forswore the use of such political AI.

We believe that is unlikely. If politically effective black boxes were developed, the temptation to use them would be almost irresistible. Indeed, political consultants might well see using these tools as required by their professional responsibility to help their candidates win. And once one candidate uses such an effective tool, the opponents could hardly be expected to resist by disarming unilaterally.

Enhanced privacy protection would help. Clogger would depend on access to vast amounts of personal data in order to target individuals, craft messages tailored to persuade or manipulate them, and track and retarget them over the course of a campaign. Every bit of that information that companies or policymakers deny the machine would make it less effective.

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Another solution lies with elections commissions. They could try to ban or severely regulate these machines. There’s a fierce debate about whether such “replicant” speech, even if it’s political in nature, can be regulated. The US’s extreme free speech tradition leads many leading academics to say it cannot.

But there is no reason to automatically extend the First Amendment’s protection to the product of these machines. The nation might well choose to give machines rights, but that should be a decision grounded in the challenges of today, not the misplaced assumption that James Madison’s views in 1789 were intended to apply to AI.

European Union regulators are moving in this direction. Policymakers revised the European Parliament’s draft of its Artificial Intelligence Act to designate “AI systems to influence voters in campaigns” as “high risk” and subject to regulatory scrutiny.

One constitutionally safer, if smaller, step, already adopted in part by European internet regulators and in California, is to prohibit bots from passing themselves off as people. For example, regulation might require that campaign messages come with disclaimers when the content they contain is generated by machines rather than humans.

This would be like the advertising disclaimer requirements – “Paid for by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee” – but modified to reflect its AI origin: “This AI-generated ad was paid for by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee.”

A stronger version could require: “This AI-generated message is being sent to you by the Sam Jones for Congress Committee because Clogger has predicted that doing so will increase your chances of voting for Sam Jones by 0.0002%.” At the very least, we believe voters deserve to know when it is a bot speaking to them, and they should know why, as well.

The possibility of a system like Clogger shows that the path toward human collective disempowerment may not require some superhuman artificial general intelligence. It might just require overeager campaigners and consultants who have powerful new tools that can effectively push millions of people’s many buttons.

Archon Fung, Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government, Harvard Kennedy School and Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This article is adapted from the authors’ new book, Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security (Prometheus, August 2023, available for preorder here).

Recent revelations that Chinese state-sponsored hackers penetrated US critical infrastructure and have the ability to disrupt oil and gas pipelines, rail systems, and the US Navy’s communications in the Pacific theater should come as no surprise. China’s pursuit of digital dominance has been decades in the making.

Reveille for China’s planners was sounded in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, in which the United States and its allies effortlessly toppled Iraqi forces. The first conflict of the digital era demonstrated to Chinese strategists the critical role of information technology on and off the battlefield.

Chinese leaders watched with dismay as the American military routed and dismantled the Iraqi military in what is considered one of the most one-sided conflicts in the history of modern warfare.

Going into the first Gulf War, Iraq’s military was ranked fourth in the world – having ballooned to more than a million troops who had been trained on weapons financed by the West to fight its bloody eight-year war with Iran.

The Chinese military, although larger in headcount at the time, paled in technological comparison with the forces commanded by Saddam Hussein. At the time, China’s air force consisted of a few fighter jets, mostly of its J-7 model – an indigenously produced replica of the Russian 1960s-era MiG-21.

Iraq’s air force, by contrast, was made up of far more advanced fighters, such as the Russian MiG-29, and its planes were supported by advanced antiaircraft missile defense systems. Yet even those advanced weapon systems proved wholly ineffective against 1990s-era American technology.

“The Chinese looked at Iraq and saw an army similarly equipped as theirs with old Soviet weaponry, and they saw how quickly the Iraqis were taken apart,” says analyst Scott Henderson of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant. Henderson was with the US Army at the time, specializing in China.

“A lot of the ease of victory had to do with the information advantage,” he says. “The Chinese looked at that as a warning to them, but also an opportunity. The Chinese realized they did not have to compete with the US plane-for-plane and tank-for-tank. They could envision how they could get to a level playing field using technology, rather than building traditional weapons.”

China’s subsequent campaign of aggressive technology modernization has enabled a sprint to near parity with the United States.

Crucial to this achievement has been China’s centralized economic control – over not only state-owned enterprises but also formerly private-sector companies over which the Chinese Communist Party has now asserted de facto legal control through a series of national security, intelligence, and cybersecurity laws.

The government announces openly the technologies it wants to develop. It did so in its “Made in China 2025” plan and also has done so in its 14 consecutive five-year plans. The Chinese government supports domestic companies to become global leaders in these technologies.

To that end, the Chinese military and intelligence services turn over to those companies R&D secrets obtained through cyber activities and intellectual property theft. As a result, advanced military capabilities, based on the stolen designs, are rapidly developed and then flow to the People’s Liberation Army as part of the “military-civil fusion” that President Xi Jinping has declared.

The end goal of this process is to transform the PLA into the world’s most technologically advanced military by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s establishment of communist rule in China.

The fruits of this espionage-fueled modernization plainly have manifested themselves in China’s march toward naval superiority. Since the early 1990s, China has been transforming its navy into an advanced modern force capable of contending with the US Navy. According to the US Department of Defense, China’s current fleet comprises the largest navy in the world with 355 vessels.

In June 2022, the Chinese navy launched its first indigenously produced aircraft “supercarrier.” Named for China’s Fujian Province, this new supercarrier forms the cornerstone of China’s modern blue-water naval force. Before Fujian, the Chinese navy’s two seaworthy carriers were small carriers that used ski-jump-like devices to launch planes. They were based on a 1980s-era Russian Kuznetsov-class carrier.

The newly launched Fujian, at nearly 1,000 feet in length, is based on America’s recently launched USS Gerald R. Ford, as evidenced in Chinese propaganda photos showing the housings for Fujian’s four electromagnetic catapults – capable of launching the ship’s entire complement of aircraft in under an hour.

How China has been able to rapidly transform its Cold War-era ships to a modern and technologically advanced naval fleet can be found in a trail of digital breadcrumbs left in the networks of American companies.

As early as 2013, the Defense Science Board reported that more than 50 Defense Department system designs and technologies had been compromised by Chinese hackers. Prominently listed in its report were advanced aircraft designs and the electromagnetic aircraft launch system that recently was unveiled on the Fujian.

In 2014, the FBI arrested a Chinese national and permanent resident of Canada for his part in a six-year conspiracy that allowed Chinese hackers access to the networks of Boeing. In his 2016 guilty plea, Su Bin admitted to having enabled the hackers to steal sensitive military information – including information on the development of America’s latest carrier-based stealth fighter, the F-35. In total, the scheme yielded the Chinese government hundreds of thousands of flight-test documents pertaining to American naval aircraft.

Penetrations were not limited to fighter jets and carriers. In 2017, a Chinese hacking group was quietly probing the network of another defense contractor. Due to the sensitivity of the program, the US government redacted the victim company’s name in all official correspondence, except to verify that the company was working on sensitive programs for the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center. In the end, the Chinese hackers stole more than 600 gigabytes of data from the contractor’s system.

Charged with developing next-generation submarine technologies and weapon systems, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center is based in Newport, Rhode Island. It is the Navy’s focal point for all research, development, testing, and evaluation of undersea warfare capabilities ranging from autonomous submersibles to submarine communication systems to small modular nuclear reactors.

The unnamed contractor was secretly developing a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile capable of being launched from submarines. “Sea Dragon” – as the program was named – was scheduled for initial deployment on US submarines in 2020.

Considered a game changer by military experts, submarine-launched supersonic and hypersonic anti-ship missiles are incredibly difficult to shoot down and nearly impossible to evade.

But in early 2018, Chinese hackers penetrated the contractor’s network and stole the Sea Dragon plans. The technology is now included in China’s naval arsenal and will surely be fielded against the US Navy during any potential conflict.

Has the US come to grips with what it’s facing? The recent revelation by Microsoft of Volt Typhoon – a state-sponsored cyber actor based in China – indicates there remains significant work to be done.

Plugging the holes

As a warfighter during a storied career that spanned 39 years, US Air Force General Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle led combat aviators flying some of the most advanced weapon systems on the planet. Before retiring with four stars, Carlisle rose to become commanding general of the Air Combat Command – responsible for overseeing, delivering, and maintaining all Air Force combat assets, including more than 135,000 airmen, worldwide.

Carlisle knew what he was talking about when he wrote in a 2020 Defense Department report on threats to the US military’s supply chain: “Our military superiority is under direct attack from our most sophisticated adversaries – nations whose cyber actors continuously target the very industry that powers the US military’s technological advantage.”

After retiring, Carlisle served as the president of the National Defense Industrial Association – an organization that works with the defense industrial base, which consists of more than 300,000 companies, including major corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman as well as smaller companies.

In 2022, the association wrote in its annual report that the defense industry “faces sustained and increasing threats of intellectual property theft, economic espionage, and ransomware, among other security breaches. Data breaches, intellectual property theft and state-sponsored industrial espionage in both private companies and university labs are on an unrelenting rise.”

These warnings should be read as an SOS for US national security. For the first time, the US military can see clearly that it could be fighting an advanced Chinese adversary armed with weapons developed from stolen American technology.

Yet the Pentagon has been unable to focus sufficient attention on the threats that face its suppliers due to limited authority and resources to identify possible Chinese penetrations in its supply chain. While the Defense Department and the defense industrial base stumble through the years-long implementation of effective cyber safeguards, Chinese cyber actors continue to pillage America’s defense intellectual property.

It is critical for Americans to understand that the centralized party-state of China is undermining and exploiting the United States’ current defenses against theft of military secrets and intellectual property. This alarming situation demands immediate and decisive action on two fronts.

Domestically, it is essential to bridge the longstanding libertarian divide between the public and private sectors. This will involve augmenting and enforcing cybersecurity regulations along the defense supply chain, cultivating an environment that supports cyber hygiene and the exchange of threat intelligence, as well as encouraging investment in the advancement and application of state-of-the-art security technology.

On the global stage, the United States and its allies must act assertively to hold China accountable for its cyber and corporate espionage, particularly when targeting defense technologies and critical infrastructure. Possible measures may include sanctions, international détentes and embargoes against Chinese corporations that benefit from the fruits of malicious cyber activities.

Furthermore, the global community needs to set standards of conduct concerning cyber-economic and industrial espionage. Such a collective effort would form a united front of nations ready to challenge China and impose penalties for its aggressive behavior.

As a naval officer, Michael G McLaughlin served as senior counterintelligence advisor for the United States Cyber Command, responsible for the coordination of Department of Defense counterintelligence operations in cyberspace. He is now a cybersecurity attorney and policy advisor in Washington, DC.

William J Holstein was based in Hong Kong and Beijing for United Press International and has been following US-China relations for more than 40 years. Holstein has worked for or contributed to top publications including Business Week, US News & World Report, the New York Times and Fortune. His nine previous books include The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States.

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