Presidential polls point to a statistical dead-heat heading into next week’s election, but there is no doubt about how voters feel about artificial intelligence (AI): Blue states are worried most about its impact on misinformation.
The landslide results — eight of the top-10 states most anxious about AI-spawned misinformation are heavily Democratic, with battleground Georgia (7%) and Republican-leaning Florida (9%) the other two states — underscore concerns over AI in technology hot beds such as Massachusetts, New York and California, which topped the poll.
“The increased attention on unethical uses of AI during the presidential campaign prompted us to look at where in America people are most concerned with these issues,” Michael Guan, CEO of Final Round AI, which conducted the study, said in an email. “We found Massachusetts was most concerned about AI, while South Dakota the least.”
Final Round AI said it analyzed Google searches over the past year for 121 terms related to learning about AI and how to detect AI-generated misinformation to determine which states were most concerned with AI-generated propaganda. By that criteria, left-leaning Massachusetts led the nation with 653 searches per 100,000 residents on average per month, 42% more than the national average of 461.
The state’s most-searched term was “AI detector,” with 26,136 average monthly searches, 57% of the state’s total.
Runner-up New York recorded 650 average monthly searches per 100,000 residents for detecting AI propaganda, 41% above the U.S. average. “AI detector” was New York’s most searched term.
California had the third-highest number of searches about discerning AI propaganda, with an average of 647 monthly searches per 100,000, 40% greater than America overall.
Overall, nine of this year’s top 10 states, and 21 out of the top 25, voted Democrat in the 2020 presidential election. Florida was the highest-placed Republican voting, at No. 9, and New Mexico was the lowest Democrat voting state at 37th (-35%).
The bottom-13 states, or those least concerned about the spread of misinformation via AI, are heavily Republican, “topped” by Wyoming (-51%), Alaska (-52%) and South Dakota (-53%).
“While AI serves much good, bad actors in the political space use the power of AI to generate masses of misinformation to further their own goals,” Guan said. “One noteworthy way of doing this is with AI-generated impersonations of celebrities saying or doing things they did not do in real life.
“Taylor Swift is possibly the most high-profile example of this, such as when the Trump campaign published images that may have been generated with AI of her falsely endorsing him for President.”
The breakdown of voter fears by state is but the latest schism in a race divided along the lines of gender, race and age. And, anecdotally, the results underscore general nervousness among Democrats in the final days before a national election, as is their custom.
