Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel, Daniel Thilo, and Jonas R. Kunst
Imagine you’re doomscrolling through your social media feed. A political controversy breaks—and within minutes, it feels like a tidal wave of commentary. Thousands of “ordinary people” pile on, repeating a theme, sharing links, and “liking” each other’s posts while drowning out dissent.
You start to wonder: Am I out of touch? Is this what people really think? Now imagine that wave wasn’t a wave of people at all. That’s one of the central risks we outline in our new Science Policy Forum article on malicious AI swarms—coordinated fleets of AI agents that can imitate authentic social opinions and actions at scale.
Why is this dangerous for democracy? No democracy can guarantee perfect truth, but democratic deliberation depends on something more fragile: the independence of voices. The “wisdom of crowds” works only if the crowd is made of distinct individuals; when one actor can speak through thousands of masks—and create the illusion of grassroots agreement—that independence collapses into synthetic consensus.
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