In which we discuss three further areas where artificial intelligence begins to touch on democracy: equality, elections, and the systemic competition between democracy and autocracy.

At the individual level, AI impacts the conditions of democratic self-rule and people’s opportunities to exercise it.

The successful application of artificial intelligence depends on a set of preconditions.

The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology’s economic, social, and political consequences. The most recent step in AI development -- the application of large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models to the generation of text, image, video, or audio content -- has come to dominate the public imaginary of AI and has accelerated this discussion. But to assess AI’s societal impact meaningfully, we need to look closely at the workings of the underlying technology and identify the areas of contact within democracy.

In this episode, we focus on remaining fears and challenges associated with algorithms: bubbles and loops, the alignment problem, and opaqueness. We close the discussion of algorithms by an account what can be done to improve their uses in society.

In this episode, we focus on algorithmic action and fairness.

Algorithms are also used to provide suggestions and advice.Iit is helpful to differentiate between algorithms providing advice and suggestions to experts and those providing advice and suggestions for lay people and users of digital communication environments and services.

Algorithms are sets of steps by which to solve pre-defined tasks. Today the term appears predominantly in connection with computing. Algorithms allow computers to perform tasks. They are crucial in the advances of computer-enabled analysis and automation.

This episode sketches the tensions that arise from the drive to generate data-enabled insights and people's expectations and rights to privacy.

Data provide a reduced representation of the world and promise to uncover hidden patterns and connections between entities that remain invisible in their full, unreduced manifestation in the world. This allows people and organizations to make sense of the world, and increase their level of control.

Quantification makes some things visible, while hiding others. To better understand this process, we have to examine how things become numbers, we have to examine measurement.

Data are crucial for the discussion of politics and digital media. Understanding the core concepts and issues arising from the quantification of social and political life and the resulting data is important for engaging in many of the subsequent controversies of the uses of digital media in politics.

Keynote zur Gemeinsamen Jahrestagung der DGPuK-Fachgruppe Journalistik/Journalismusforschung, der DGPuK-Fachgruppe Kommunikation und Politik, dem Arbeitskreis Politik und Kommunikation (DVPW) und der Fachgruppe Politische Kommunikation (SGKM) an der Universität Trier vom 29. September 2022.

In this episode, we look at three studies illustrating how to approach different aspects of the contemporary public arena empirically.

Digital media have not only challenged the position of traditional structures of the public arena. Digital media have also led to the emergence of new structures hosting the contemporary public arena in digital communication environments. In this episode, we discuss some of the most pressing challenges raised by the digital extension of the public arena.

In this episode, we discuss the impact of digital media on one of the most important structures hosting the public arena, the news media.

Democratic societies need spaces in which people and political elites become visible to each other, develop shared agendas, and settle on collectively binding decisions. These spaces are the public arena.

In this episode, we will focus on how digitally enabled challenges fail and how to assess their legitimacy and impact on democracy.

In this episode, we will focus on digitally enabled challenges to political parties.

In this episode, we will focus on the mechanisms through wich digital media allow challenges to social institutions.