IDENTITY VALLEY NEWSLETTER #4

Last year, GenAI was going to turn democratic elections upside down – Why didn’t it?

by Ferdinand Ferroli

At the start of 2024, dubbed the “year of elections” with 60+ elections worldwide, many feared generative AI would flood our feeds with deepfakes so convincing that voters wouldn’t be able to tell fact from fiction. Governments and tech companies scrambled to discuss countermeasures like watermarking and detection tools.

Now, in early 2025, we know AI slop and disinformation is a challenge, but it’s just a sideshow to the real threat: algorithmic control over public discourse, unchecked power of platforms shaping and amplifying what people see. On X, a single retweet or endorsement from Elon Musk can take a post from obscurity to viral prominence, pushing a particular narrative in front of hundreds of millions of users. And there is evidence that the algorithms themselves are engineered to amplify only certain voices. No watermark can defend against that.

It’s too simplistic to assume voters are swayed by a fake image, video, or text. By now, most users have priced in GenAI’s capabilities. The real game isn’t about faking content but it’s about manipulating attention, controlling which narratives are amplified and which are buried.

This is not a new insight. Cambridge Analytica’s (controversial) success in 2016 wasn’t about fabricating lies but micro-targeting real messages at the right moment to the right audience. But today, platforms like X exert decidedly greater control over information flows. And while Musk still “manually” drives engagement, advances in agentic AI will soon enable the automation of personalised persuasion at scale.

The lesson? The revolutionary power of AI for influencing public discourse isn’t primarily about making fakes indistinguishable from reality. Generative AI puts deception at scale into many hands, but the greater danger lies in the few who control the platforms. No watermark will fix that. Only transparency and accountability over algorithms can.

The real fight for democracy isn’t spotting fakes—it’s reclaiming control over the information landscape.

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What we are reading

This article on "Post-Cognitive Income" by Matt Prewitt and Jack Henderson of RxC explores how AI-driven automation may render cognitive labour obsolete, proposing fresh ideas offering an alternative to the popular idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to ensure dignity and economic stability.

In "Crypto is for criming” Paul Krugman, holder of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, makes a strong case against cryptocurrencies (in their current application). The official "presidential" meme coins $TRUMP and $MELANIA (issued after his article) are another case in point and add a new flavour to his arguments.

People are setting up "traps" (so-called "tarpits", originally developed to frustrate spammers) on their websites to protect against their content ending up in AI training data.

Effective Altruism is out, Moral Ambition in - at least, if we read Rutger Bregman right. Also, less "awareness raising", more doing. English edition coming April 2025.

The first International AI Safety Report, contributed to by global AI experts, examines not only the capabilities, risks, and mitigation techniques of general-purpose AI, it also provides a quite approachable introduction to GenAI.

Identity Valley's contribution to "Human-Centered Digitalization," edited by Alexander Brink (University of Bayreuth), explores Digital Responsibility Made to Measure (in German) and the role of Digital Responsibility Goals® in Corporate Digital Responsibility. The anthology showcases practical examples of companies implementing digitalization with a focus on public welfare and human-centricity, published by Nomos Verlag (Download here).

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Hidden gem

"It's the most misunderstood word in the English language. At least in the United States, people don't really understand what the word 'excited' means. They think it means happy. So, when they meet you, they tell you, 'Oh, I'm so excited to meet you.' And this is not the meaning of the word. Happiness is often calm and relaxed. 'Oh, I'm so relaxed to meet you.' And excited is when all your nervous system and all your brain is kind of on fire. And this is good sometimes, but a biological fact about human beings and all other animals is that if you keep them excited all the time, they collapse and die. And I think that the world as a whole and the United States and Silicon Valley is just far too excited."

- Noah Yuval Harari, in this episode of "Your Undivided Attention" (2024).

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Some upcoming events

February 6&7, Paris

Inaugural Conference of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI 2025

February 10&11, Paris

Artificial Intelligence Action Summit

March 11&12, Warsaw

Data Spaces Symposium 2025

March 19&20, Luxembourg

EU Open Data Days 2025

March 27&28, Geneva

Global Conference on AI, Security and Ethics 2025

May 14, Berlin

Rise of AI Conference

May, 14&15, Dublin

IAPP AI Governance Global Europe 2025