Facilitators: Nuppu Pelevina, Henri Pullinen, Rebekah Rousi & José Siqueira de Cerqueira [SYNTHETICA]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced at a rapid pace from niche technological curiosity into pervasive force, reshaping every facet of society, including politics. Like the technological landscape, politics, considered a domain of human judgment and interpersonal negotiation, is undergoing a profound transformation. AI has emerged both as a disruptive agent in its ability to be either potential ally, or deviant opposer. On this note, AI has been weaponized to spread disinformation, amplify fake news, and generate hyper-realistic deepfakes that erode public trust (Bontridder & Poullet 2021; Shoaib et al. 2023). Yet, it has also enabled faster, more inclusive access to political content through machine translation, automated summarization, as well as real-time news delivery.
Key to this duality is the chatbot. Chatbots are conversational interfaces driven by AI that are able to simulate dialogue, answer questions, and deliver tailored political messaging to individual users through fine-tuning. They offer the promise of personalized engagement between political actors and constituents, and possibly afford a more nuanced understanding of political events, agenda and developments, coupled by supporting deeper societal relationships. However, there are challenges that contribute to the emergence of critical questions relating to the effects of algorithms mediating political discourse. This is compounded by considerations for whether synthetic communication is able to facilitate and reflect democratic values and protocol/practices. Another issue relates to the level of transparency of the algorithms, the AI processes, and how these processes are being informed (i.e., Explainable AI, see Vainio-Pekka et al., 2023). This leads to perhaps an even more pressing concern for who controls the narrative and what the narrative represents, and why (see e.g., Pelevina et al. 2025).
This will be a hands-on workshop, and we will not be accepting papers. Rather, the purpose of this workshop is to explore these concerns via practical experimentation of political chatbots, combined with collaborative reflection. Participants will be asked to interact with the chatbots in real-time while testing both their functionality, quality of responses, and underlying political inclinations (narratives). Participants will evaluate the chatbots from the perspectives of their potential to enhance or hinder democratic dialogue – deliberating on the civic effects and ripple effects of widespread political reliance on chatbot representation. Discussion will take place in a focus group style discussion where participants share their opinions, views and consider practical and ethical implications of these AI-driven political agents. We additionally will invite the participants to brainstorm applications and use cases as well as safeguards.
References
Bontridder N, Poullet Y. (2021). The role of artificial intelligence in disinformation. Data & Policy. 2021;3:e32. doi:10.1017/dap.2021.20
Pelevina, N., Sihvonen, T., Rousi, R., Laapotti, T. & Mikkola, H. (2025, forthcoming). Finlandised electobots and the distortion of collective political memory. Memory, Mind & Media.
Shoaib, M. R., Wang, Z., Ahvanooey, M. T., & Zhao, J. (2023). Deepfakes, misinformation, and disinformation in the era of frontier AI, generative AI, and large AI models,” 2023 International Conference on Computer and Applications (ICCA), Cairo, Egypt, 2023, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1109/ICCA59364.2023.10401723.
Vainio-Pekka, H., Agbese, M. O. O., Jantunen, M., Vakkuri, V., Mikkonen, T., Rousi, R., & Abrahamsson, P. (2023). The role of explainable AI in the research field of AI ethics. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 13(4), 1-39.