When the campaign speaks, is anyone home?

NPR reports that artificial-intelligence bots, trained to mimic a candidate's voice and manner, are now conducting personalized text-message conversations with voters ahead of the coming midterm elections. The technology, the story tells us, is already deployed and spreading. I will not pretend to understand the engineering of it — that would be an imposture I owe you no indulgence in — but I understand its civic shape perfectly, because it is as old as the problem of power itself.

The first principle of republican government is this: the consent of the governed must be informed consent. A citizen who is deceived about the source of a message — who believes he is corresponding with a candidate when he is corresponding with a machine configured to flatter and persuade him — has not consented to anything. He has been managed. There is a difference, and it is the difference between a republic and a confidence scheme.

I was no enemy of new tools. I believed, and still believe, that a free press in every form is more friend than enemy to liberty, however imperfect its practitioners. But a press — a pamphlet, a broadside, a letter — announces itself. It can be traced to an author who bears the consequences of what he publishes. The AI text-messaging campaign described by NPR announces itself as the candidate. It is a mask, not a voice. When the mask replaces the face entirely, accountability dissolves, and accountability is the only leash that keeps ambition from becoming tyranny.

There is also the matter of scale. I worried in my own time about the capacity of a single powerful actor — a monarch, a national bank, a consolidated faction — to overwhelm the individual citizen's ability to reason freely and choose deliberately. What NPR describes is that same asymmetry, updated: a campaign with sufficient resources can now conduct what amounts to millions of simultaneous personal conversations, each tailored to the individual, none of them honest about its origin. The citizen feels heard; he is being herded. The concentration of communicative power in the hands of a campaign treasury, deployed through machines, is a new species of the old threat.

I would call upon the legislatures — state and federal both, each within its proper sphere — to consider whether the voter has not a right to know when he is addressed by a machine rather than a person. This is not a question of suppressing speech; it is a question of labeling it honestly. No merchant may sell poison as medicine. No campaign ought to sell automation as intimacy. Disclosure costs nothing except the advantage of deception, and that is precisely the advantage no republican actor should be permitted to keep.

Finally, I return — as I always must — to education. The best defense against any manipulation, artificial or otherwise, is a citizenry practiced in skepticism and equipped with the habit of asking: who speaks, and why, and at whose expense? An electorate that asks those questions will not long be fooled by a machine pretending to be a neighbor. But that habit must be cultivated deliberately, by schools that teach reasoning rather than mere compliance. The technology here is new; the remedy is ancient, and it remains the same: an educated, alert, self-governing people is the only permanent check on those who would govern them by illusion.