Ethical Dilemmas Surrounding Artificial Intelligence and Efforts to Find Higher Ground

Floyd A. Brown December 15, 2024

Artificial Intelligence is being unethically used to manipulate the public’s opinion and emotions in the 2024 Presidential Election. The use of media is not a new tool on the political battlefield. However, in this election cycle our social media is bombarded with AI generated images and animated reels of the major candidates, fake endorsements and sleights. This poses a risk to the freedom of choice that people in accessing truthful information for an informed decision in electing a leader.

Some images are discernible as false and computer generated (Knight, 2024), where the candidates pose in a family portrait with their “child”, or individually with images that seem from a blind artist or computer algorithm. The manufactured nature of other images is not so obvious in that they are fake such as where initially it was believed that a video showed that the popular popstar, Taylor Swift, had endorsed the republic ticket for president. Opposing political party affiliates simultaneously rejoiced and gasped at the thought of how her influence of over 200+ million may impact the election.

Their reactions were swapped soon thereafter when they learnt the endorsement was created by artificial intelligence. As Taylor noted in a later release, with the dangers of AI, one must come out and tell the truth. Herein lies another casualty of AI’s intrusiveness on people who want to remain silent or private in their personal choices, in that they may be compelled against their will to say what was once a privilege to keep private. 

Society needs to find a middle ground in adopting AI with minimum impact on individual rights. Oprah had a special tv production on the march of AI and the impact it will have on Society. One of her guests argued that we need to seize the positive changes that AI brings us. However, we need to embrace the technology as a collective and not as was done where a few individuals pulled the world into development of nuclear weapons and the threats of war and annihilation brought on by the Fission Age (Wiggers & Zeff, 2024). Using the truth telling to compel use of AI is a critical step in ethical development and application of AI. Representative Adam Schiff of US Congress introduced the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act to ensure the work of Artificial Intelligence companies is compliant with copyright usages (Robins-Early, 2024). These types of new laws will help protect individuals’ rights and public awareness while providing a balanced middle ground for meeting the needs for AI systems ethical usage of information.

References

Kyle Wiggers, Maxwell Zeff. “Oprah Just Had an AI Special with Sam Altman and Bill Gates – Here Are the Highlights.”

TechCrunch, 13 Sept. 2024, https://www.techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/ophah-just-had-an-ai-special-with-sam-altman-and-bill-gates-here-are-the-highlights/.

Knight, W. (2024, September 10). Why AI is so bad at Generating Images of Kamala Harris. Wired. 

https://www.wired.com/story/bad-kamala-harris-ai-generated-images/Links to an external site..

Robins-Early, N. (2024, April 9). New bill Would Force AI Companies to Reveal use of Copyrighted art.

The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/09/artificial-intelligence-bill-copyright-art.