A survey of 2,203 US adults: 53% say AI misinformation will impact who wins the 2024 election, 35% say AI will decrease their trust in election ads, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey isolates an election-specific expression of broader public anxiety: an earlier poll found widespread concern about AI’s harmful effects, captured in earlier public concern about AI’s negative consequences.
The concern later gained institutional salience when the WEF ranked AI-driven mis- and disinformation among leading global risks for the 2024 voting year. Post-election research subsequently found AI-amplified false political narratives and hate speech, while not finding that they changed voters’ minds.
First-order effects
- The reported concern makes trust—not only exposure—the immediate issue for election advertising: a meaningful share of adults expects AI to weaken confidence in what campaigns show them.
- Campaigns, political advertisers, and the platforms carrying their ads face a more skeptical audience around AI-altered or AI-generated political material.
Second-order effects
- Political advertisers may need clearer provenance, disclosures, or rapid rebuttals to preserve credibility; platforms face greater pressure to distinguish legitimate campaign content from deceptive material.
- Distrust can impose costs even where misinformation does not persuade: voters may discount authentic ads alongside suspect ones, reducing the effectiveness of paid political messaging.
Third-order effects
- If this distrust persists, election integrity will increasingly depend on verifiable content provenance and distribution controls, not merely post-publication fact-checking.
- The broader governance challenge is dual-use AI: the same low-cost generation and distribution capabilities that aid legitimate communication can also scale deceptive political content, creating pressure for durable rules without assuming public concern itself proves electoral impact.
The trend: AI is shifting political-risk discussions from whether synthetic content can circulate to whether audiences can still trust the information environment around elections.