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ChatGPT and the 2024 US election
2024 will be the first US presidential election in the age of generative AI. How worried should we be about the spread of misinformation and its implications for democracy?
In 2016, social media platforms became Petri dishes of disinformation as foreign actors and far-right activists spread fake stories and worked to heighten partisan divisions. The 2020 election was fraught with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud.
As 2024 approaches, tech and media experts warn that new generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney have the potential to spread misinformation and disinformation faster and easier than ever before. And this comes as newsrooms are experiencing mass layoffs and trusted systems like Twitter’s verification process become further eroded.
On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Media experts Brian Stelter and Nicole Hemmer says the stakes are incredibly high for truth and democracy.
“I think AI is going to make it easier to have a lot more information pollution in the atmosphere,” Stelter warns.
But Hemmer says there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. “I think that people don’t want to be post-truth,” she argues, “So maybe that’s where we’ll see those green shoots as people innovate ways to make it easier to navigate a world that’s awash in this kind of disinformation.”
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: "Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation"
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation
Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, GZERO World takes a hard look at the media’s impact on politics and democracy itself.
In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “the media is the message.” He meant that the way content is delivered can be more powerful than the content itself.
A lot’s changed since 1964, but the problem has only gotten worse. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the rise of a 24/7 cable news cycle and hyper-partisan radio talk shows. The 21st century has thus far given us podcasts, political influencers, and the endless doom scroll of social media. And now, we’re entering the age of generative AI.
All of this has created the perfect ecosystem for information––and disinformation––overload. But there might be a bright spot at the end of the tunnel. In the world where it’s getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction, news organizations, credible journalists, and fact-checkers will be more important than ever.
How has media changed our idea of truth and reality? And how can we better prepare ourselves for the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation that is almost certain to spread online as the 2024 US presidential election gets closer? Can trust in American’s so-called “Fourth Estate” be restored?
Ian Bremmer sits down with journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter and Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor specializing in political history and partisan media.
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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Ian Explains: The media's trust problem
It’s getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction. Trust in media is at an all-time low. At the same time, partisanship is skyrocketing, and generative AI is challenging the very idea of truth.
This week on Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer breaks down how the media landscape has changed since the early days of live TV and why the 2024 US presidential election will be a major test of our ability to detect and prevent misinformation from spreading online.
Cable news has come a long way from the 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where Nixon famously showed up sweaty and pale, while John F. Kennedy showed up tanned and camera-ready. People who listened on the radio thought Nixon won the debate. But on TV, the advantage went to Kennedy and the polls quickly turned in his favor. It was the first-ever live TV debate and forever changed how media and politics interact with each other.
In the 60-plus years since, it’s only gotten harder to separate the message from the medium. A 24/7 cable cycle has turned the idea of news into mass entertainment. And hyper-partisan talk radio shows, thousands of political podcasts, and social media’s endless doom-scroll have created a perfect incubator for information––and disinformation––overload.
2024 will be the first US presidential election in the age of generative AI. The risk of spreading false or misleading information to voters is enormous. Despite calls from industry watchdogs and tech experts, US lawmakers have yet to pass any real guardrails for AI technology. And given the rapid pace of development, by the time the election rolls around next year, it will be even harder to tell an AI-generated video or image from the real thing.
Whether regulators and lawmakers can come up with an effective way to identify and combat AI misinformation is anyone’s guess, but one thing is clear: the stakes are incredibly high. And the future of US democracy may depend on it.
Watch Ian Explains for the full breakdown, and for more on the US, watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.
Canada may pull the plug on Fox News
Back in March, before Tucker Carlson tried to convince America to invade Canada, and before he was fired in the fallout from the $787 million Dominion settlement, he did a segment that could see Fox fade to black in Canada.
In the rant — about a school shooting in Nashville, where a transgender man killed three children and three adults — Carlson warned about “trans terrorism,” saying Christans should prepare to be targeted for violence by the trans movement, a “deranged and demonic ideology.”
In the United States, with its strong First Amendment protections of free speech and weak broadcast regulation, Carlson’s rant was just another salvo in the culture war. But in Canada, it could have regulatory consequences, because Carlson attacked Egale, a Canadian LGBTQ organization, saying it was lying about violence against trans people, which it wasn’t.
A week after the broadcast, Egale sent a complaint to the CRTC — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (Canada’s version of the Federal Communications Commission) — asking that it ban Fox News.
“To position trans people in existential opposition to Christianity is an incitement of violence against trans people that is plain to any viewer,” wrote Egale.
Egale has a case. Canadian law forbids broadcasting material that “is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt.” Describing trans people as “demonic” would seem to qualify.
The regulator, which is run at arm’s length from the government, has banned other channels. Last March, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the CRTC announced that RT and RT France — which are controlled by the Russian government — could no longer be carried by Canadian cable outlets.
“Foreign channels can be removed from the authorized list should their programming not be consistent with the standards to which Canadian services are held,” said Ian Scott, who was then the chairperson of the regulator.
If that is the standard the CRTC uses, it would ban Fox. No Canadian broadcaster could get away with running a rant like the one Carlson did. The CRTC routinely acts with a heavier hand than the FCC, which has been restrained ever since 1985, when Ronald Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine. In June 2022, for example, CRTC ordered Radio-Canada, the French language branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to apologize for even mentioning the N-word in a radio broadcast about a book important to Quebec nationalists.
Earlier this month, the CRTC agreed to consider Egale’s complaint. It opened a public consultation process that has so far collected 6,500 submissions from both people who want Fox banned to prevent it from spreading hate and Fox fans who would see a ban as an attack on freedom of expression.
Peter Menzies, the former vice-chair of the CRTC, thinks Fox could get yanked. “I think the CRTC is very predisposed to getting rid of them,” he says.
Menzies says the regulator could just note that Carlson was fired and issue a warning: “The other option would be to take a look at it and say, ‘Yeah, we find they did something wrong here,’ and just write a nasty letter, and say ‘please don't do it again.’”
But Menzies, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is worried about the prospect of a ban because the Liberal government recently passed Bill C-11, extending CRTC’s authority to the internet, drawing streaming services under the authority of the broadcast regulator for the first time.
Conservatives warned that this would lead to censorship, while the Liberals insisted it was about ensuring that big streamers like Netflix follow Canadian content rules that apply to other broadcasters. Menzies fears the critics might be right.
And he would like to know why the CRTC has been swift to act on Fox but seems to be dragging its feet dealing with China Central Television Channel 4, or CCTV-4, a Chinese state broadcaster that CRTC approved in Canada in 2004. The CRTC has yet to rule on a complaint from Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist who was arrested by Chinese officials in 2016. The authorities broadcast Dahlin’s forced confession on CCTV-4, a tool the government in Beijing routinely uses to humiliate activists.
If the CRTC bans Fox News for spreading hate, shouldn’t it also ban CCTV-4 for airing forced confessions? Neither ban would do what the CRTC intended in 1987 when it enacted the Television Broadcasting Regulations: stop Canadians from consuming the content in question. All the content is available on the web, which did not exist in 1987.
Until the Liberals passed C-11, the CRTC based its authority on its stewardship of a public resource — the airwaves — but in the modern internet era, consumers can watch whatever they like from anywhere in the world.
Fox News is not included in basic cable packages in Canada and doesn’t appear to be widely viewed. Canadian TV ratings aren’t public in the way that Neilsen ratings are in the United States, so it’s hard to be sure, but it does not even register in Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report on Canada.
But that doesn’t mean nobody is watching. Many Canadian Fox fans are getting their fix online. Research shows that Fox reports on the “Freedom convoy” helped energize protesters last year, because the content was spread through social media platforms, where content is unregulated.
Banning Fox would enrage its Canadian fans — further enflaming a group that is already incandescent with rage against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — but it likely wouldn’t do much to stop people watching.
Carlson, after all, is moving his show to Twitter, beyond the reach of the CRTC. Growing numbers of Canadians are cutting the cord, and getting their video online. Canada can send a signal about Canadian values by banning Fox, but it can’t stop anyone from watching.
Members of the activist groups Truth Tuesdays and Rise and Resist gathered at a weekly FOX LIES DEMOCRACY DIES event outside the NewsCorp Building in Manhattan.
Dominion Voting v. Fox News: The stakes are higher than you think
Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems, following a one-day delay, are set to square off in court on Tuesday. Dominion is suing for defamation, claiming that Fox’s hosts and guests knowingly spread a false narrative that the company’s voting systems flipped votes against former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
What’s at stake?$1.6 billion, the future of the media industry, and the Super Bowl of libel law decisions.
The outcome will have implications for both the media and the First Amendment. SinceNew York Times v. Sullivan gave broad protection to the American press in 1964, there have been almost impossibly high standards for suing a media organization for defamation. Prosecutors need to prove “actual malice” or that the outlet knowingly, or with reckless disregard for the truth, published a falsehood.
Dominion says Fox pushed lies about it algorithmically transferring votes to Biden. These lies, Dominion claims, cost it $1.6 billion in reputational damages. Armed with emails and texts, Dominion’s legal team reportedly aims to reveal that Fox News execs and hosts did not believe Trump’s election fraud claims.
Fox News, meanwhile, is expected to argue that it is protected by the First Amendment and that it was merely covering Trump’s narrative about the results. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and founder Rupert Murdoch are expected to testify.
Why haven’t they settled? Slated to begin on Monday, the trail was delayed late Sunday for last-minute settlement discussions. Negotiations are not expected to succeed, as Dominion is fighting to recoup its reputation more than financial losses.
Fox News may be more amenable to settling after being reprimanded for potentially withholding evidence. But any settlement would also include an apology under terms set by Dominion, which would come at a reputational loss for the right-wing media giant.
Dominion’s lawyers, who filed requests with the court on Monday that indicate they are ready to proceed, believe they have enough evidence to meet the defamation threshold.
If the jury sides with Dominion, the ruling will upend decades of defamation precedent protecting the media. If Fox prevails, it will send the message that the First Amendment protects outlets even when they spread disinformation. Whatever the decision, the implications of this trial extend far beyond the courtroom.
Behind Trump’s public theater: real attacks on US standing
Right before Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser were about to get overseas correspondent gigs at The New York Times and The New Yorker, respectively. Both turned it down, deciding to stay in America to cover the Trump presidency.
But what ensued was so crazy that "we got to be foreign correspondents in our hometown," Glasser tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, for the first time in front of a live studio audience.
Trump was something no one had ever seen before in US politics. He was "from another planet in terms of Washington," says Baker. And he didn't change his style right to the very end: the Jan 6. Capitol insurrection he spurred.
For Baker, Jan. 6 was "not an outlier" but rather the result of Trump's four-year war on American political institutions.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US votes as democracy is under attack
A member of the media and a Jersey City police officer watch the smoke from the remains of New York's World Trade Center pour from lower Manhattan as they stand a a media center established at the Liberty Scenic Center in Jersey City, New Jersey September 12, 2001.
Farewell to the flip phone: How media has changed since 9/11
My Motorola flip phone wasn't working. No signal, just those three piercing tones that indicate something is wrong.
Like everyone else in 2001, I had a landline phone in my New York City apartment and a dial-up modem connected to my laptop. Both proved to be a lifeline to the outside world as I watched the events unfold from inside my apartment.
At the time, I was fresh out of graduate school, freelancing as a reporter for an NPR program called On the Media. I contributed profiles of Broadway stars, a piece on the etymology of the word "diva" pegged to a VH1 concert series, and an interview about famous dogs on screen. All were captured on a Marantz cassette recorder that weighed nearly 10 pounds. I recently learned that those devices are described as "vintage" nowadays, should you want to buy one on eBay.
It was the summer of shark attacks and Chandra Levy. "Drops of Jupiter" and "Bootylicious" both played constantly on the Walkman sports radio I strapped to my arm for jogs around Central Park.
On September 10, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld delivered a speech declaring that the greatest threat to US national security was Pentagon bureaucracy.
Less than 24 hours later, the world changed. Words like Kabul, Kandahar, and al-Qaeda would flood the airwaves.
Using that trusty dial-up modem, I blitzed my resume out to every TV station inbox I could find. Within a couple of days, I was working for MSNBC and a part of what was the biggest story of my lifetime.
As I think about the 20 years since, of course I remember first and foremost the people. The people I interviewed, like Paula Berry whose husband died in the South Tower that day; Alice Hoagland, mother of United flight 93 hero Mark Bingham; and also a little girl whose name I don't know, captured in a photo taken downtown after the towers fell. She was completely covered in dust, her tears creating streaks on her ghost-white face.
But I also think about the enormous changes in the media industry I've witnessed since, how technology and tools evolved at a breakneck pace almost immediately.
The goodwill and unity of the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks faded away in the subsequent months and years as we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no shortage of opinions spouted on cable news, but it was the voices emerging online that became increasingly important.
First came the blogs. As controversy and anger swirled around the 2003 invasion of Iraq, CBS News and its flagship anchor Dan Rather had begun an investigation into then President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The damning piece aired on television just weeks before the 2004 election. Within hours, a few emerging blog platforms (one whose name, I won't forget, was Little Green Footballs) dismantled the work and eventually the career of one of America's most established journalists. The fatal flaw? Rather and his team fell for fraudulent documents typed in a font that didn't exist in 1973.
Next came online video, and whole new world of storytelling. It's hard to believe that YouTube wasn't launched until 2005, and it's a challenge to remember life — or television reporting — without it. With the proliferation of these videos came an explosion of camera phones that captured broadcast quality images.
After I'd moved to CBS, as a producer for Evening News anchor Katie Couric, I covered the death of activist Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot in the streets of Tehran amid violent protests following the 2009 election in Iran. Neda's death was captured on cell phone video and shared throughout social media. Time magazine called it "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history," and the amateur images went on to win a prestigious journalism award.
By then social media itself, Twitter and Facebook primarily, were also in full bloom and became an ever-more important reporting tool. After launching a Twitter account for Katie Couric, one of the first US TV news anchors to have a presence there, I was accosted in the halls of CBS by Paul Friedman, then vice president of the venerated news division.
"It's beneath the anchor of the CBS Evening News to be on the Twitter," he said.
Katie felt otherwise, and apparently so did the rest of the world. Now it's a primary place for sharing and gathering information — for better or worse.
The uses of social media as both a tool and a weapon are obvious. It fueled the Arab Spring, but also became a recruiting ground for ISIS. Today, disinformation abounds — promulgated by state actors and individuals alike for personal or political gain. In this pandemic we've seen every conspiracy theory imaginable about vaccines, microchips, and even livestock medicine.
We've also seen videos of New Yorkers banging pots and pans at 7pm to cheer on healthcare workers, arias sung on a balcony in Florence as Italy confronted unimaginable suffering, and people pressing their noses against nursing home windows to come as close as was safe and feasible to their loved ones.
There was no social media on September 11, 2001, at least not as we now know it. Millions of us all watched together as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and, yes, Dan Rather walked us though the stages of collective heartbreak.
If I had a Twitter account then, I would have shown you pictures from Ground Zero and clips of people I met as I roamed the streets booking guests for cable news. Maybe I'd become emotional after working a 14-hour day and quote a poem or show you a poster I found on 7th Avenue, a photo of a man with the words "Have you seen me?" written above.
But I'm glad we had only the tools we did on that day. Instead, I walked out into the street and hugged my friend Lea. My friends and neighbors all stood together on a pier in Riverside Park looking south. We gathered together in bars, often in silence, listening to the news.
The only blue light flickering was from the television screen, and all eyes were on it.
Tony Maciulis is Chief Content Officer at GZERO Media.