Entrenched viewpoints and reduced political efficacy

"Design choices such as greater personalisation of AI assistants and efforts to align them with human preferences could also reinforce people’s pre-existing biases and entrench specific ideologies. Increasingly agentic AI assistants trained using techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and with the ability to access and analyse users’ behavioural data, for example, may learn to tailor their responses to users’ preferences and feedback. In doing so, these systems could end up producing partial or ideologically biased statements in an attempt to conform to user expectations, desires or preferences for a particular worldview (Carroll et al., 2022). Over time, this could lead AI assistants to inadvertently reinforce people’s tendency to interpret information in a way that supports their own prior beliefs (‘confirmation bias’), thus making them more entrenched in their own views and more resistant to factual corrections (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). At the societal level, this could also exacerbate the problem of epistemic fragmentation – a breakdown of shared knowledge, where individuals have conflicting understandings of reality and do not share or engage with each other’s beliefs – and further entrench specific ideologies. Excessive trust and overreliance on hyperpersonalised AI assistants could become especially problematic if people ended up deferring entirely to these systems to perform tasks in domains they do not have expertise in or to take consequential decisions on their behalf (see Chapter 12). For example, people may entrust an advanced AI assistant that is familiar with their political views and personal preferences to help them find trusted election information, guide them through their political choices or even vote on their behalf, even if doing so might go against their own or society’s best interests. In the more extreme cases, these developments may hamper the normal functioning of democracies, by decreasing people’s civic competency and reducing their willingness and ability to engage in productive political debate and to participate in public life (Sullivan and Transue, 1999)."