Public Opinion Facing the Challenge of Artificial Intelligence.

There is a certain consensus that artificial intelligence (AI) is configured as the heart of the fourth industrial revolution, with the same centrality as the steam engine (first revolution), the internal combustion engine (second), and information technology and electronics (third). Each stage generated profound transformations in the mode of production, modifying social relations and their political forms.

The starting point of this work will be the review of three theories or models of public opinion: the classic perspective of deliberative democratic theory, the innovative one that observes public opinion as a complex adaptive system, and the third that rests on the formation of a Bourdesian habitus, these three perspectives that are now intervened by digital technologies. In this sense, the underlying hypothesis is that the fragmentation of audiences facilitates the task of communication carried out by automated digital media via artificial intelligence algorithms and builds new practices and perception schemes from the information that the users themselves upload to the network and that in turn allows the training of algorithms.

To conduct this work, a bibliographic review will be carried out on the current state of the situation of AI (for now restricted to narrow AI). AI includes a series of aspects that automate complex tasks, but (even at its current levels of development) it has already coined the concept of “synthetic media”: images, videos, and messages generated by algorithms whose deliberate objective is to influence public opinion. An analytical attempt will also be made to observe how products generated by AI can modify (or manipulate) public opinion understood as the contradictory management of political common sense.

Finally, some hypotheses will be raised about the controversial future of automated political communication technologies, and the impact that they generate on political processes in general and on electoral processes in particular.