The other AI

In March, the Reuters news agency published a review of more than 2,000 Russian court cases showing that security-camera footage and facial-recognition technology had been used in the arrests of hundreds of people. Initially, authorities were using the technology to identify and detain people who’d joined various anti-government demonstrations, but after the invasion of Ukraine last year, they started using it to intercept protesters and prevent them from demonstrating at all. Now they’re using it to spot and whisk away opponents of the Kremlin whenever they want. It’s a remarkable capability—and just one that autocrats are developing with technologies powered by artificial intelligence to clamp down on their populations. How far can these capabilities go?

Steven Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology Is Reshaping Politics, Power, and Resistance. As Feldstein explains, repression-enabling AI applications have become key elements of the authoritarian repertoire around the world. Autocrats have invested heavily in them because—although they’ve insulated their power and rolled back democratic movements in recent years—they understand that the biggest standing threat to that power is still their own people, either rising up in revolutions or voting them out in elections. And the biggest emerging opportunity to control people is by connecting the digital environments they increasingly live in to state surveillance systems powered by AI …

John Jamesen Gould: How have autocrats been using artificial intelligence?

Steven Feldstein: There was a moment in the early 2010s when new digital-information and -communication platforms—social-media applications, especially—had started to play a remarkable role in helping civilians around the world mobilize and challenge the authoritarians they were living under. We saw this from the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet Eurasia through the Arab Spring. And it led to a lot of optimism that these liberation technologies—as they were called—would help propel a new wave of democratic revolutions globally.

What’s actually happened, alas, is that authoritarian governments have figured out how to use new digital technologies—in particular, AI applications—to repress their citizens more effectively, to undercut emerging liberation movements, and to reinforce autocratic political power. We’ve seen this in China, above all—but also in Russia, the Gulf states, and other authoritarian or illiberal regimes. The range of applications has been expanding, but a few use cases stand out.

One is tracking popular discontent and, when it comes to it, controlling mass protest. That can work in a number of different ways. It can work on a mass scale through automated social-media monitoring—interpreting what people are thinking from what they’re saying online. It can work through public-surveillance cameras and other ways of seeing when and where people are gathering—and then preempting political demonstrations or arresting people who participate in them. We’ve seen this increasingly in Russia, for instance, in these techniques Moscow uses to pick up and neutralize anti-war protesters.