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Sep 2023
43m 22s

Checks and Balance: Intelligence test

The Economist
About this episode

Countries with a collective population of four billion will vote for leaders next year. There are fears that recent advances in generative artificial intelligence will make voters more vulnerable to deception than ever. But disinformation has long been a problem, well before the age of deepfakes and large-language models. How worried do we really need to be about AI’s potential to undermine democracy?


Chihhao Yu of the Taiwan Information Environment Research Centre explains the threat posed by Chinese misinformation campaigns. We go back to when sensationalist journalism drove America towards war. And Senator Josh Hawley explains why he wants AI to be regulated.


John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Idrees Kahloon.


Runtime: 44 min


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