Generative AI and Democracy: Impacts and Interventions

Seger's May 2024 report is the foundational framing paper for Demos's AI and democracy research programme — a comprehensive mapping of generative AI's democratic impacts across three domains: epistemic effects (misinformation at scale), political effects (manipulation and polarisation), and institutional effects (erosion of trust in democratic institutions). The three-domain taxonomy provides a structured analytical framework that subsequent Demos AI research builds on.

The intervention taxonomy that follows the impact analysis is the report's practical contribution: spanning technical interventions (watermarking, detection), regulatory interventions (platform obligations, liability), and civic interventions (media literacy, prebunking), it maps the full landscape of available counter-measures and their relationship to the different categories of impact. For practitioners designing AI governance frameworks and for policymakers working on the democratic implications of AI deployment, this report provides the most comprehensive available framework from a UK civil society source.