AI and Ideologies: Navigating between Digital Capitalism and Illiberal theories

Over the past decade, scholarship on digital authoritarianism has rapidly expanded, highlighting how governments and political actors increasingly appropriate digital technologies to surveil, discipline, and mobilize populations. While much of this work has focused on state-driven practices of control, censorship, and surveillance, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)—and more recently, generative AI systems—has introduced us to a new terrain on which ideological struggles play out. Beyond the familiar logics of repression and manipulation, AI is being instrumentalized by political actors, intellectual entrepreneurs, and transnational networks who seek to frame, deploy, and reorient AI in line with illiberal worldviews.