Hi, podcast listeners. This is Esther Fang, and I produced the president's inbox. This week, we are airing a TPI replay of a timely episode. In September, Jim sat down with Jessica Brandt, policy director for the artificial intelligence and emerging technology initiative at the Brookings Institution. We thought it would be insightful to resurface this conversation about artificial intelligence and its

influence with the year of elections in full swing and the 24 U.S. elections on the horizon. Enjoy.

Welcome to the president's inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of

Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is artificial intelligence in the

2024 U.S. presidential election. With me to discuss how AI might affect the 2024 U.S. elections is Jessica Brandt.

Jessica is the policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative

at the Brookings Institution, where she is a fellow in the foreign policy programs Strobe Talbot's Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology.

Before joining Brookings, she was the head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy

and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Jessica has written extensively on foreign interference

in U.S. politics and on the implications of emerging technologies for liberal democracies.

This episode is part of the Council on Foreign Relations Diamondstein Spielbogle project

on the future of democracy. Jessica, thank you for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me. We are now less than 14 months out from the U.S. general election,

which will select not just the next president, but a third of the Senate, all of the U.S. House,

and governorships and state legislatures across the country. Now, it's well

known that U.S. elections have been particularly fractious in recent years, and into this mix

suddenly comes artificial intelligence. Does the appearance of AI in the scene, Jessica,

suggest we might repair those divisions or deepen them?

I think we're going to deepen them.

I mean, I think the explosion that we've seen in generative AI is going to exacerbate or turbocharge some of the challenges we've been grappling with, as you alluded to, for some time.

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