News That Caught Our Eye on AI and Democracy #72

Published on August 19, 2025

Summary

Sen. Josh Hawley probes whether Meta’s AI bots endanger children, as America’s largest landlord drops AI rent-setting under a DOJ settlement. New research shows LLMs boosting participatory budgeting, while a report faults cloud giants for stifling innovation and an op-ed urges governments to use AI to strengthen democracy. Kenyan data labelers demand better conditions, and the Legal Resources Center warns of AI deepfakes and spyware fueling online attacks on migrants, women, and LGBTQIA+ communities in Africa. Plus dozens of free InnovateUS workshops on AI, democracy, governance and more. Read more in this week’s AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Upcoming InnovateUS Workshops

InnovateUS delivers no-cost, at-your-own-pace, and live learning on data, digital, innovation, and AI skills. Designed for civic and public sector, programs are free and open to all.

UX in Government: How to Hire, Build Skills, and Grow Capacity
August 21, 2025, 2:00 PM ET
Cindy Phan, UX Engagement Lead, U.S. Digital Response, Keith Wilson, Talent Engagement Manager, US Digital Response.
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Future-Ready Government: Building Resilience Across State and Public Agencies
August 26, 2025, 2:00 PM ET
Dan Chenok, Executive Director, IBM Center for The Business of Government.
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AI Fundamentals for Public Safety
September 4, 2025, 2:00 PM ET
Mark Genatempo, Fellow, Rutgers University’s Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience.
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New Workshop Series

Curated by experts and focused on specific themes, these workshops are free. Attend one or all

AI for Law Enforcement
Aimed at law enforcement and public safety professionals builds foundational knowledge and best practices for responsible AI deployment in policing. Hosted by the State of NJ and the Rutgers Miller Center on Policing and Community. Begins September 4.
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Public Engagement for the AI Era
Learn how to design effective and efficient AI-enhanced citizen engagement that translates public input into meaningful outcomes. Hosted by Reboot Democracy and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard. Begins September 11.
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Amplify: Mastering Public Communication in the AI Age
Explore how AI tools—when used responsibly and transparently—can strengthen communication, broaden outreach, and counter disinformation. Hosted by former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson and John Wihbey, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University. Begins Oct 7.
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Governing AI

One Year On, EU AI Act Collides with New Political Reality

Caterina Rodelli and Sarah Chander on August 7, 2025 in Tech Policy Press

“In August of last year, the European Union’s landmark Artificial Intelligence Act entered into force... The law promised…to protect people from the most dangerous and discriminatory AI systems, while championing the ‘EU values’ of trust, innovation, and fundamental rights. A year later, the world in which this legislation was written is largely gone. Since then, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in global and European politics driven by a transatlantic race for AI supremacy, a deregulatory agenda in Brussels, and a wave of militarization. These shifts aren’t background noise — they upend the assumptions that shaped the AI Act and force us to ask uncomfortable questions: Can we still talk about how ‘AI governance’ can balance rights and innovation when those rights are no longer even part of the discussion?”

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AI and Public Engagement

AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will

Manon Revel and Théophile Pénigaud on August 1, 2025 in arxiv

“This article unpacks the design choices behind longstanding and newly proposed computational frameworks aimed at finding common grounds across collective preferences and examines their potential future impacts, both technically and normatively. It begins by situating AI-assisted preference elicitation within the historical role of opinion polls, emphasizing that preferences are shaped by the decision-making context and are seldom objectively captured. With that caveat in mind, we explore AI-based democratic innovations as discovery tools for fostering reasonable representations of a collective will, sense-making, and agreement-seeking. At the same time, we caution against dangerously misguided uses, such as enabling binding decisions, fostering gradual disempowerment or post-rationalizing political outcomes.”

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AI and Public Engagement

Leveraging LLMs for Privacy-Aware Predictions in Participatory Budgeting

Juan Zambrano et al on August 7, 2025 in arxiv

“Participatory Budgeting (PB) empowers citizens to propose and vote on public investment projects. Yet, despite its democratic potential, PB initiatives often suffer from low participation rates, limiting their visibility and perceived legitimacy. In this work, we aim to strengthen PB elections in two key ways: by supporting project proposers in crafting better proposals, and by helping PB organizers manage large volumes of submissions in a transparent manner. We propose a privacy-preserving approach to predict which PB proposals are likely to be funded, using only their textual descriptions and anonymous historical voting records -- without relying on voter demographics or personally identifiable information. We evaluate the performance of GPT 4 Turbo in forecasting proposal outcomes across varying contextual scenarios, observing that the LLM's prior knowledge needs to be complemented by past voting data to obtain predictions reflecting real-world PB voting behavior. Our findings highlight the potential of AI-driven tools to support PB processes by improving transparency, planning efficiency, and civic engagement.”

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AI and Problem Solving

5 AI Tools Revolutionizing How I Work as a Physician and Nonprofit Exec

Alister Martin on August 9, 2025 in Medpage Today

“As an emergency physician and a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change where I lead a collaborative effort that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for social good, I've witnessed firsthand how AI is transforming both clinical practice and organizational leadership. Here are the five AI tools that have fundamentally changed how I work.” AI tools are transforming how healthcare professionals conduct research, create visualizations, learn, teach, and perform clinical documentation. “These tools represent more than individual productivity gains -- they're reshaping how healthcare organizations can operate. When physicians and healthcare leaders can research faster, communicate more effectively, learn more efficiently, document more accurately, and present more compellingly, the entire system benefits.”

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AI Infrastructure

How Big Cloud becomes Bigger: Scrutinizing Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's investments

David Gray Widder and Nathan Kim on August 4, 2025 in SSRN

“In an AI gold rush, those selling the proverbial pickaxes are surest to win: cloud companies provide scalable managed computational resources as a subscription service now used by most businesses to store their data, and as a primary ingredient to build and use AI. Just three companies—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—control two thirds of global cloud compute market share, collectively comprising ‘Big Cloud.’ This highly concentrated market raises concerns regarding digital sovereignty, slowed innovation, and a concentration of corporate power. In this report, we explore an underrecognized manner in which AI ecosystems increasingly depend on Big Cloud: Big Cloud’s investment in other companies. We show how Big Cloud companies are prolific investors widely deploying hundreds of billions of dollars over thousands of deals, often in smaller, lesser-known startups.”

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AI and Public Safety

Tech-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence

Jaimee Kokonya on August 4, 2025 in Legal Resources Centre

“...In this episode of Legal Resources Radio, digital-rights advocate Jaimee Kokonya from Access Now in Nairobi helps us unpack the many faces of tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). We discuss how doxxing, deep-fake pornography, location-tracking spyware and coordinated harassment campaigns are being deployed against women, LGBTQIA+ people and migrants across East and Southern Africa… Jaimee explains why online attacks on queer and migrant communities have surged and how queer-phobia and xenophobia reinforce one another. We examine cases where Ugandan authorities have used social-media platforms and dating apps to entrap LGBTQIA+ people, and we trace the global networks fuelling anti-rights movements online.”

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AI and Public Safety

Senator Begins Child Safety Investigation Into Meta’s A.I. Bot

Cecelia Kang on August 15, 2025 in The New York Times

“Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said on Friday that he was starting an investigation into Meta’s generative artificial intelligence products and whether they posed harms to children, the latest scrutiny of whether the social media giant takes appropriate safety measures when it comes to minors. Mr. Hawley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, informing him of the inquiry. The letter demanded that the company turn over documents and communications related to a report by Reuters that said Meta had allowed A.I. bots to have ‘sensual’ and ‘romantic’ conversations with children.”

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AI and Public Safety

The Justice Department Is Putting Rent-Setting Algorithms On Notice

Melissa Angell on August 16, 2025 in Inc

“A proposed settlement between the Department of Justice and Greystar, America’s largest landlord, will prohibit the latter from using a software product relying on algorithms to set rental prices in the country’s housing market. The government accused Greystar, which oversees nearly 1 million rental properties, of price-fixing through an AI-powered software from the company RealPage, which allowed landlords to share rental pricing information with one another. Greystar did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the proposed deal.”

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AI and Labor

We interviewed A.I. workers about the unseen work that supports the massive industry.

Eli Rosenberg on August 14, 2025 in Hard Reset

Interview with workers in the data annotation industry: “[W]orkers across the globe toil, sometimes for very low wages and under stressful conditions, to do repetitive and menial digital tasks to train A.I. systems. Much of this work takes place overseas in places like Kenya and the Philippines, where third-party companies like Scale AI and others take advantage of lower labor costs and weaker laws to contract out work for major A.I. firms….But the work is increasingly trailed by a list of labor concerns, including misclassification, blocked, delayed, or missed payments with little ability on the part of workers for recourse or correction…In response to these problems, a group of data labelers in Kenya founded a collective to start organizing, raise awareness about the work, and push companies to take actions they aren’t doing on their own: the Data Labelers Association.

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AI and Labor

Policy Roundups on Tech and Work

News Staff on July 31, 2025 in UC Berkeley Labor Center

The UC Berkeley Labor Center has compiled recent legislative, policy changes impacting how tech is used in the workplace from April to mid-July 2025. There has been a surge in state-level activity, with numerous bills enacted or introduced that govern use of AI in healthcare, education, and public services. Significant developments at the federal level include the White House’s executive orders on AI procurement for federal agencies and use of AI in classrooms.

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AI for Governance

Democrats need to start using AI to help save democracy

Kimberly Wehle on August 20, 2025 in The Hill

"There’s much more that might be done, including using AI to educate citizens on the benefits of democracy, how institutions work and the facts underlying important issues; to create large-scale, moderated public deliberation and consensus around divisive issues; to detect and alert the public to manipulated media, thus combatting misinformation and disinformation and fostering public trust in an alternative to Trump; and to create and implement effective messaging strategies for alternative visions for the future of the country. AI could be American voters’ best friend, not their enemy. It just needs to be asked."

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