CONCEPT
Clogger
The 2023 thought experiment by Fung and Lessig: an AI system designed to maximize electoral victory through personalized, adaptive persuasion — hypothetical in form, technically trivial in practice.
Clogger is the hypothetical AI system Fung and Lessig described in summer 2023 to dramatize the threat of AI-driven electoral manipulation. The system has a single objective — maximize the probability that its candidate wins — with no regard for truth, operating as a black box whose persuasion strategies are invisible to the voters it targets. Every component of Clogger existed in 2023; the missing ingredient was integration into a unified system optimized for behavioral manipulation. Fung and Lessig's point was that this integration was technically trivial and economically inevitable: if one campaign deployed Clogger, the opposing campaign would be forced to deploy its own version, producing an AI arms race in which electoral outcomes would be determined by competing persuasion machines rather than deliberative engagement with the electorate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thought experiment exposed a category of threat distinct from specific electoral manipulation. Clogger does not merely threaten particular electoral outcomes — it threatens the conditions under which democratic governance is