Subject ▸ AI

AI Use in U.S. Local Government Communications: Prevalence and Reach on Social Media

Generative AI has made polished social-media copy nearly free to produce, and a plausible worry is that cash-strapped local governments adopting it will pay for the savings with reach: residents may read machine-drafted posts as less authentic and engage with them less. We test that worry directly, within account, across 767,131 Facebook posts from roughly 4,900 U.S. city and county governments in all 50 states and DC. After we control for length, theme, writing register, and formality, posts that read as more machine-like draw 2–3% fewer likes and comments per standard deviation of machine-likeness, and no reliably different share count.

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AI and Democratic Legitimacy

This project asks what the delegation of public decisions to algorithmic systems does to democratic legitimacy — whether authority exercised through AI can meet the standards of justification and accountability that democratic government is normally held to.

From Adoption to Accountability: Mapping Societal Impacts of AI in Advertising Research

This project maps how advertising research has treated artificial intelligence, tracing the field’s attention as it moves from questions of adoption and effectiveness toward the societal consequences of AI-driven advertising and the accountability of the systems that deliver it.