In the three years since Americans last cast ballots in a presidential election, there’s been a global technological revolution that has upended the way we create and consume images, audio, and words.

And while campaign season kicked off in the United States last month with Republican presidential candidates taking the debate stage in Wisconsin, the potential influence of generative AI appeared months ago in ads featuring AI-generated images and audio.

Concerns about AI’s potential to facilitate the mass creation and distribution of mis- and disinformation abound, but experts said there’s also potential for the technology to have a positive impact when it comes to informing voters—though that’s unlikely to happen in time for the 2024 contests.

“I don’t think we have figured out how to manage the negative impacts of social media…and now we have this new technological wave to worry about,” Irina Raicu, who leads the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University, said.

“All of the things we worried about with the impact of algorithmic feeds and how they shape political engagement are still there,” she explained. “Now they have this augmentation via generative AI, which can make the fake stuff more believable, easier to generate, faster.”

Keep reading here.—MA

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After months of hand-wringing over whether a fresh AI wave would doom humanity—or at least take over the workplace—it may be unsurprising that Americans aren’t entirely sold on the technology.

A Gallup poll published this week found that four in five US adults don’t trust businesses to use AI responsibly, and three-quarters expect it to take away human jobs. Around 40% of those surveyed thought AI does more harm than good, while 50% were split on the question.

That distrust has yet to rain too hard on businesses’ parade, which have rushed to integrate various forms of generative AI into both enterprise and consumer products. But a growing pile of data showing a sizable level of AI skepticism or disinterest among the public could prove a problem as companies seek to make the tech commonplace.

Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at Bentley University, which partnered with Gallup on the survey, told Tech Brew he was surprised to see the extent to which concerns typically confined to tech-critic circles have permeated the mainstream.

“I was kind of surprised that there’s such a widespread distrust; like we had this question about whether businesses are going to use AI responsibly, and it was pretty overwhelmingly cynical,” Giansiracusa said. “So that kind of struck me, that…distrust of how AI will be used has kind of permeated beyond the tech critics to the larger mainstream culture.”

Keep reading here.—PK

A who’s who of tech leaders went to Washington this week for a closed-door Senate meeting with a simple goal: To help Congress understand what’s going on with AI right now.

Attended by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as labor and civil rights groups, the session was the first in a series of “AI insight forums” organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The idea is to beef up legislators’ knowledge of the tech’s ins and outs before they fashion any new rules to govern it.

While the forum wasn’t open to the media or public, releases of prepared remarks and reports coming out after the fact seem to indicate it was a civil affair with not much in the way of a clear path forward for regulation.

In a press conference after the forum, Schumer said the discussion started with the common ground that everybody in attendance believed some kind of government intervention to be necessary.

“I asked everyone in the room: Is government needed to play a role in regulating AI? And every single person raised their hands, even though they had diverse views,” Schumer said.

Keep reading here.—PK

Stat: 24%. That’s the percentage of US adults who are aware that the US does not have a standard privacy law, according to a Pew Research survey published last month.

Quote: “The big problem with plant-based meats is they fall into the category of ultra-processed…There’s just tons of evidence that these are the kinds of foods to avoid…The ingredient list is lengthy and very impressive, and that has been the basis of attack by the meat industry.”—Marion Nestle, a food studies professor at New York University, to Grist

Read: How Elon Musk went from superhero to supervillain (the New Yorker)

Next stop, EVolution: If you’ve got questions about the EVs and AVs hitting our roads, register for Tech Brew’s free virtual event exploring the topic with industry experts. Sponsored by NI.*

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Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

We’re not doing what everyone else is doing: Hi! I bet you thought we’d be writing about the new offerings from Apple today. A shiny new iPhone! A…Watch Ultra 2! (“Ultra Watch 2” sounds better to our ears, but whatever; we’re not marketers.)

Well, we’re not. We’ve got an iPhone 12 that’s still kicking and no reason to replace the device used mostly for maintaining friendships via text message. Or, wait, what? Oh for God’s sake.

Sigh. Guess you’ll find us in line outside an Apple store, after all.