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Erica Chenoweth shares a brief addendum to the Nonviolent Action Lab’s workshop held in December 2024 on how AI can influence social mobilization, for better or worse.
People power movements are those in which large segments of society engage in collective action to demand greater political freedom and democracy. In other words, people power is about people. It always has been and always will be.
However, over the course of history, people power movements have both exploited and adapted to the changing technology landscape they inhabited. The advent of the printing press is often cited as a key factor behind the diffusion of ideas that animated the Protestant Reformation. Gandhi’s exploitation of international mass media was key to his strategy of satyagraha, which hinged on a large audience bearing witness to the brutality and injustice of British colonialism. The Solidarity movement in Poland similarly benefited from the mass distribution of its opposition newspaper, allowing its membership to grow into the millions. The ability to live-televise the roundtable negotiations between Solidarity’s leadership and the communist regime meant that regime loyalists could not lie about the proceedings. In Tunisia and Egypt, social media platforms were critical in allowing movement activists to coordinate, organize, and distribute messages to broad audiences in ways that were initially difficult for their governments to address.
But one of the striking features of the advent of AI—particularly the emergence of LLMs and more accessible generative AI tools—is the relatively slow adoption of these tools by social movements, even as governments and private companies have quickly integrated them. This may be less about algorithm aversion per se, and more about a widespread lack of awareness about the ways in which AI tools can (and cannot) address some of the common challenges some movements face. Instead, much of the movement discourse about AI has been related to fears of the enhanced surveillance and targeting capabilities against movements that come from such technologies, as opposed to curiosity about how movements can integrate accessible AI tools to make organizing and mobilizing against autocracy easier. Yet it is clear from our workshop discussion that there are a seemingly infinite number of applications of AI to a range of movement challenges. Some potential applications are more promising than others, to be sure. But many merit serious consideration.
That said, unbridled optimism about emerging technologies is also unwarranted. There are plenty of reasons for caution. Among other lessons, several participants in our workshop observed parallels in the discussion with overly optimistic assessments of the emancipatory potential of the internet and social media. In hindsight, real questions arise about whether the internet—and social media in particular—have done more harm than good to social movements, civil society, and democracy as a whole. In the case of AI, the most sophisticated technology resides in the hands of the largest, wealthiest, and least-regulated companies the world has ever seen. Without explicit commitments by big tech to human rights and democracy, the producers AI tools and the democracy movements that might integrate them could be dangerously misaligned in their motivations.
Regardless, and consistent with observations shared during our December 2024 workshop, the world of AI moves at lightning speed. And even in the three months since our workshop took place, multiple groups have launched initiatives to begin addressing this adoption gap. For instance, since the workshop took place, CANVAS launched their Activist Intelligence initiative. Social Movement Technologies has offered training workshops on AI. And I learned about other ongoing efforts, such as Cooperative Impact Lab’s AI for Organizing and Campaigns Hackathons that took place before our workshop, in the summer of 2024.
In other words, the AI for social movements space is rapidly developing in ways that could indeed be transformative—in both promising and perilous ways—for people power movements. The rapidity of these developments thus reinforce the four key takeaways of our own workshop, which emphasized the value of a sustained consortium dedicated to both knowledge and practice, a rapid scaling of trainings (and, perhaps, evaluation of trainings), research evaluations of the impacts on AI adoption on movements and campaigns, and the need to develop a code of conduct to address some of the ethical and even security vulnerabilities attached to these tools. Now that literacy in the potential uses of these tools is clearly expanding, addressing some of the first-order issues (like responsible use, and the ability to assess both helpful and harmful impacts of AI adoption on movements) seem as urgent than ever.
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