Artificial Intelligence in Politics: Establishing Ethics

Abstract

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have produced AI tools that help political campaigns to prevail in election cycles. There have been notable early successes for campaigns using this technology, particularly in 2016 for the Trump presidential campaign and, during the Brexit referendum, the U.K. Leave Campaign. Critiques of these pioneering tools argue that they have adopted unethical practices, and that monitoring the ethical use of such tools is too complex a task, particularly when tools are the intellectual property of private corporations. This article challenges that notion and proposes a way to engage in dialectics with advanced tools of AI in governance as they go about their tasks. The proposals presented here could help electorates around the world to build up observable integrity within their election cycles and thereby increase levels of trust in the societal institutions tasked with ensuring them free, fair, and open election conditions.