Eric Schmidt stopped short of pulling the trigger on a $1 million plan to explore using the technology to garner votes
© Getty Images / Alex Wong
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt considered using artificial intelligence (AI) to win elections for Democrats, but backed out at the last minute, according to a report by Axios published on Thursday.
The $1 million proposal, from a subsidiary of Schmidt’s own philanthropic OneOne Ventures and dated earlier this month, would have put at least three technical teams to work on new AI tools related to political advertising, Axios revealed. The results would have been tested during the 2024 race.
However, the billionaire ultimately rejected the plan for reasons he declined to make public via a spokesperson. The committed Democrat is still reportedly expected to get involved in some kind of election-related AI project for the forthcoming contest.
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Republicans have already unleashed an AI-generated ad for 2024, countering President Joe Biden’s official re-election announcement with a 30-second ‘Beat Biden’ spot featuring a series of computer-generated ‘what if’ catastrophe vignettes. In the clip, Biden’s victory is followed in rapid-fire by China invading Taiwan, the closure of 500 regional banks, 80,000 migrants over-running the US-Mexican border, and the city of San Francisco somehow closing its doors.
If not for the tiny line of text in the upper-left corner revealing the ad was AI-generated, the images could easily pass as real to human audiences. AI-generated deepfakes are expected to cause major disruptions in the news cycle during the months preceding the election, though the technology is advancing so rapidly it is hard to tell what will be possible to fake by October 2024.
Schmidt poured $4 million into the 2022 midterm elections after dropping $8.5 million on the 2020 race, and he is expected to donate big in 2024 as well. The former Google CEO has bankrolled voter analytics software and other tech enhancements for Democratic campaigns, and his influence has been heavily felt in the Biden administration’s tech policy.
Last year, Schmidt announced he was giving away $125 million through Schmidt Futures to AI researchers focusing on “hard problems” in the field, explaining he hoped to hardwire ethical considerations into the technology while addressing the seismic upheavals it is expected to cause in the labor market and economy, the way humans perceive and consume information, and the fusion of man and machine.
