Interesting that it looks like News and Elections were where people thought AI would have the most negative impact. I’d consider it to be almost inconsequential for both, compared with stuff like employment and customer service - including government and healthcare - which I expect to be a dystopian nightmare.
Here's why I think AI has the potential to absolutely destroy news and elections: The wave of fake content will only get better and look more real over time, causing even larger amounts of false belief, but perhaps even more worryingly, a grand break down in trust overall.
This will funnel people into having deeper trust for their sources, and less trust of sources they don't know. The end result will be even greater control of people's information sphere by a few people who shape those trusted channels, separating people from reliable news and information about the world. This will be disastrous for democracy, as democracy depends on voters being able to make decisions on reliable true information.
I don't know if this will come to pass, but the above narrative seems highly probable based on what we have see so far with social media, especially video-driven social media.
"News and Elections" let you influence large swaths of the population. A shitty customer service bot that can't give a good answer wouldn't influence anyone besides "Now I understand what Rage Against The Machine was all about", but it's not gonna make "un-electable" people suddenly presidents, compared to what you can do with a influence campaign on social media.
