Artificial Democracy - The Observation

What

Friedrich Ebert was the first chancellor in Germany to come to power through free democratic elections. Can elections under the influence of AI still be called free? Who will be the first German chancellor to be elected by the system of artificial democracy?

Is artificial intelligence a threat to democracy or a tool for finding new ways to participate in democratic processes? What do the experts say? Who are the experts? Can you rely on what the experts say? Or is invoking the experts already part of the problem?

What we will do is observe the discourse, filter out the recurring arguments, structure them, and try to find out if and how arguments and moods change over a period of two years.

Why

Given that participation in democracy for the majority of citizens consists primarily of voting for those representatives of the people whom they trust, the most relevant question we have to ask is this: Are there real people and real events that we trust, or rather the images constructed by AI? Obviously, we have to face the fact that it is the image that we trust, not the actual reality. In a way, this is nothing new. Since the mass media have dominated our thinking and feeling, the image has had much more influence on us than what actually happens. The important question today is whether, in the age of artificial intelligence, it is even possible to distinguish between image and reality, and what this means for democracy.

How

A student project group, led by a sociologist, will analyze videos, articles in newspapers and magazines, as well as posts and comments on X, Instagram and Facebook, and the corresponding chats. The first results will be presented in the fall of 2025, and the final results in 2026 as part of the "Design for Democracy" events.

This page displays a collection of the most recent YouTube videos on the topic being researched.

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