The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
And election campaigns are using artificial intelligence in novel ways. Earlier this year in the US, the Republican presidential primary campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis posted doctored images of Donald Trump; the Republican National Committee released an AI-created ad depicting a dystopian future in response to Joe Biden’s announcing his reelection campaign; and just last month, Argentina’s presidential candidates each created an abundance of AI-generated content portraying the other party in an unflattering light. This surge in deepfakes heralds a new political playing field. Over the past year, AI was used in at least 16 countries to sow doubt, smear opponents, or influence public debate, according to a report released by Freedom House in October. We’ll need to brace ourselves for more chaos as key votes unfold across the world in 2024.
The year ahead will also bring a paradigm shift for social media platforms. The role of Facebook and others has conditioned our understanding of social media as centralized, global “public town squares” with a never-ending stream of content and frictionless feedback. Yet the mayhem on X (a.k.a. Twitter) and declining use of Facebook among Gen Z—alongside the ascent of apps like TikTok and Discord—indicate that the future of social media may look very different. In pursuit of growth, platforms have embraced the amplification of emotions through attention-driven algorithms and recommendation-fueled feeds.