A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.
Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude require websites to be crawlable by AI bots for effective mentions and citations. Disabling JavaScript improves crawlability, as many AI crawlers struggle with JavaScript rendering, which differs from Google’s capabilities. This means publishers must ensure essential content is accessible even without JavaScript. AI optimization tools like Aiso can evaluate and enhance a site's crawlability, providing suggestions for improvement. Site owners must also verify their robots.txt files to allow AI bot access, as many content management systems restrict bots by default.
