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AI threatens democracy. But we are not powerless: here’s how to fight back | Carine Fouteau
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- DeepHorus
Artificial intelligence is intensifying a profound information crisis that threatens democracy, Carine Fouteau argues, calling for urgent and broad mobilisation. She says big tech companies pose an immeasurable social, political, military and ecological threat. Their tools, she warns, now serve as weapons of mass destruction against democracy. The stakes are so high, she contends, that citizens cannot remain passive.
Fouteau notes that journalists of her generation have witnessed four major digital revolutions: the internet, social media, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence. What fundamentally changes with AI, she says, is the relationship with truth. For big tech companies, the boundary between truth and falsehood has vanished. This makes it essential to reaffirm the role of public-interest journalism, whose mission is to seek factual truth and resist fake news and propaganda.
The threats she identifies include harvesting personal data, weaponising public opinion, destroying jobs, infringing civil liberties and damaging the environment. Ordinary citizens, she writes, are the main victims of this predatory economy. Its agenda, she adds, aligns with the interests of the planet’s most authoritarian and reactionary states. AI companies are reshaping the information space to their own advantage, prioritising profit over public interest.
Their methods include plundering news outlets without authorisation or compensation, Fouteau says. By disseminating so-called summaries of reporting, they siphon off audiences and revenue, serving the private interests of a select few at the expense of the common good. She argues that AI-generated responses are not information. They are merely a logical assembly of words that all too often produces falsehoods, distorts facts and misinterprets information.
A real news article is something else, she insists. Quality journalism is the product of expertise guided by ethical standards: persuading sources to speak, painstakingly gathering eye-witness testimonies, cross-referencing, verifying and establishing facts. This process relies on reporting or investigative work—in other words, human effort in the field. Good journalism organises and prioritises information, providing context and nuance, while AI levels everything down to the lowest common denominator and breeds confusion.
Fouteau stresses that quality journalism comes at a high price, and some costs cannot even be quantified. Journalists who report from war zones, for example, risk their lives. Mediapart’s recent investigation into Jordan Bardella, the head of Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, resulted in anonymous cyber-harassment and death threats against the editorial team. Media outlets are accountable for what they publish and answer to courts and readers, while AI companies appear answerable only to their shareholders.
She warns that AI companies refuse to vouch for the reliability of their conversational agents in order to evade legal liability. If nothing is done to stop it, this pillaging will result in the destruction of journalism, she says. That outcome would be dangerous not just for news publishers but for everyone, because it signifies the demise of a public sphere defined by free, pluralistic and democratic discourse. Fouteau asks whether the public wants reliable, independent information or algorithms that amplify fake news, deepfakes and propaganda, fuelling fear, anger and division. She adds that tech companies have sown the seeds of their own downfall by bleeding dry the very sources of information they depend on, and she calls for mobilisation to fight back.
