How tech is disrupting public debate in democracies.
AI: Tool or Threat to Democracy?
Nearly a billion questions… per day. Since its launch by OpenAI in 2022, the conversational AI ChatGPT – like Copilot (Microsoft), Gemini (Google), and DeepSeek (from the company of the same name) – has seen a constant increase in the number of its users and, with them, the number of requests made. This constant chatter between humans and machines mostly occurs quietly, within the privacy of a web browser or a digital application. However, it inevitably raises a flood of questions that are spread across newspapers, academic journals, and bookstores – and which are addressed, this time, from humans to humans.
One of these questions, expressed in countless formulations, could be summarized as: “Is artificial intelligence (AI) a tool or a threat to democracy?” Discussions are in full swing. Some, like Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, a professor at Sorbonne University and a connoisseur of AI-related issues, emphasize the risks that large pre-trained language models, or “LLMs” – the technology underlying agents such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Deepseek – pose to the quality of information circulating within our societies. Others, like the group of experts from the Fondation Jean Jaurès gathered to process citizen contributions collected during the “grand débat national” – Emmanuel Macron’s response in 2019 to the “gilets jaunes” movement – praise the possibilities offered by these technologies to better take into account the voices of the represented.
Of course, if the subject occupies so much media space, it is primarily because it was introduced as a selling point by those most interested, namely the players in the digital technology sector. These actors “rushed to promote their products by emphasizing their supposedly pro-democratic qualities,” notes Sébastien Broca, a lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University Paris-VIII. As often, a certain company sets the tone: to tout the merits of its first “personal computer,” the Macintosh, the company relied, in January 1984, on a commercial invoking the work of George Orwell. Broadcast in prime time during the Super Bowl halftime show, the clip presents a dystopian society where interchangeable masses are hypnotized by a “Big Brother” promoting the benefits of a single thought via a giant screen, also unique. Before an athletic young woman, a symbol of modernity, comes to break this monopoly of influence with a hammer.
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