Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

Predictions that AI bot swarms were a threat to democracy weren’t ‘fanciful’, said Michael Wooldridge, professor of the foundations of AI at Oxford University. Photograph: Cultura/REX/Shutterstock

Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.

The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and messaging channels.