The acceleration of artificial intelligence may already be disrupting democratic processes like elections and could even threaten human existence, AI experts warned at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York. The explosion of generative AI - which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended prompts - in recent months has spurred both excitement about its potential as well as fears it could make some jobs obsolete, upend elections and even possibly overpower humans. “The biggest immediate risk is the threat to democracy…there are a lot of elections around the world in 2024, and the chance that none of them will be swung by deep fakes and things like that is almost zero,” Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University, said in a panel at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Wednesday.