This week Elizabeth talks with Seher Shafiq, a program manager at the Mozilla Foundation and expert in civic engagement, particularly in the context of elections and engaging marginalized people in the vote. They discuss how AI is impacting Canadian elections, civic engagement, and democracy. They look at helpful and not so helpful uses of AI tools in elections and chat about ways these tools could be used to increase voter engagement. Seher concludes the episode with suggestions for how we can deal with the lack of trust in AI, including an emphasis on digital literacy. 

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Additional Resources:

• Elizabeth mentions the report she wrote with Pol Comm Tech Lab member and PhD student Michelle Bartleman, The Political Uses of AI in Canada, which touches on a lot of the topics discussed in this episode. 
• Check out this article, The impact of generative AI in a global election year, by Valerie Wirtschafter for examples of AI robocalls/media impersonating candidates, as mentioned by Seher.
• For more information on the threat that deepfakes pose for Canadian elections, consult The Evolution of Disinformation: A Deepfake Future, a report published by CSIS. 
• For an overview of digital literacy theories, listen to our final episode from Season 3 of the podcast: Mapping theories for media and digital literacy. 
• Elizabeth also mentions two past episodes on personal influence: The Two-Step Flow and Opinion Leaders with Nick Switalski and Personal Influence in Politics.
• Seher mentions the recent report, Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich, written by Stefan Baack of the Mozilla Foundation in collaboration with the Mozilla Insights team. It explores  Common Crawl’s “influence as a backbone for Large Language Models: its shortcomings, benefits, and implications for trustworthy AI.” 
• Find more from Seher on her website, X, and LinkedIn.

Check out www.polcommtech.ca for annotated transcripts of this episode in English and French.