AI Risks for Democracy, the Economy, and Civil Rights

The lack of clarity on whether a speech, image, or video is real or artificial is at the center of the debate over AI's benefit to society.

This article was written for ACM News and published on 1 April 2025.

Since January’s launch of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese open-source variant of OpenAI’s GPT-o1, the metaphor of the ‘AI race’ has dominated the geopolitical discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The debate on the real impact of AI on society and the best ways for AI to benefit society as a whole has faded into the background.

However, these topics were at the heart of the conference session “Risks from AI to the Economy and Society” at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston.

The complete article can be read here.