Stateline: Arizona’s top election official pitches benefits of AI, not just risks

Stateline’s Jonathan Shorman covered Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ presentation to a national group of election officials discussing the benefits and challenges of confronting artificial intelligence (AI) in election administration. 

“Don’t be afraid of it just because you might not understand it or you think you don’t understand it. Trust me, not a lot of people do very well. But we cannot avoid the conversation. It’s incredibly important,” Fontes told the conference audience Tuesday.

The winter report — developed by Fontes’ AI and Election Security Advisory Committee — says AI may help election officials share critical information with voters. AI could, for example, share details about races that will appear on a ballot and convenient voting locations.

The Arizona secretary of state’s chatbot conducted 655,000 “conversations” about the 2024 election, Fontes said. The top three questions to the bot from members of the public concerned early voting, the status of individual voters and in-person voting locations… 

At the same time, both Fontes and the report warn that AI risks supercharging cyberattacks on election officials and undercutting confidence in elections. In 2023, Fontes used an AI-generated deepfake video of himself to welcome election officials to a training on AI-based attacks, underscoring how the tech can be weaponized to sow confusion.”

Read more at Stateline.