By AFP and Focus | 2025-12-03

STOCKHOLM -- Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to strengthen democracy and community life rather than doomscrolling, Taiwanese programmer and “cyber ambassador” Audrey Tang told AFP December 2 as she prepared to receive an award in Stockholm.

"I believe we can steer AI away from addictive intelligence that lures people in ... into assistive intelligence, where AI systems are steered by the community in service of communities," Tang said.

A self-taught programmer who left school at 14 and later worked in Silicon Valley before serving as Taiwan's minister of digital affairs, Tang spoke to AFP hours before receiving the Right Livelihood award, sometimes called the "alternative Nobel."

Using technology to empower citizens

She won the prize for "advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides," the jury said in a statement in October.

In a 2023 Voice of America interview, Tang stated that China's stringent speech controls not only impede its AI development but also create an opening for models trained in free societies.

Once stored and run offline on a small device, such language models could bypass internet gateways, allowing Chinese users to look up suppressed events without censorship, she said.

Tang said she was convinced that humans would remain "the superintelligence." However, the public must ensure that it steers AI to empower communities rather than big business, she said.

She cited Taiwan's efforts to develop AI tools that can communicate across the island's different language and cultural groups.

"Instead of training one sovereign model that unified all these ideas, we have the civic AI trained by each language community, each cultural community," she said.

The different AIs can then communicate with one another, she added, helping to bring diverse groups together around common civic causes.

Tang pointed to cooperation between climate justice activists and religious groups that promote "creation care" -- caring for the environment as God's creation.

AI, she said, "can translate the climate justice work to the biblical community, so they also see them as doing God's work."

Such work could boost more than just the environment, Tang said.

Countering authoritarian narratives

"We really do need to counter the narrative that democracy only leads to polarization and chaos and never delivers, because that is the overarching narrative of authoritarianism," she said.

That message is especially important in a place such as Taiwan, a self-ruled democratic island that China claims as part of its territory and has not ruled out seizing by force.

Tang said Taiwan had become a "top target" for disinformation and efforts to deepen polarization, facing about two million attempted cyberattacks a day, many of them originating from China.

The day before receiving the award, she lectured at Stockholm University about Taiwan's democratic journey and its connection to the wider world. Drawing on the island's plate-tectonic history, she said Taiwan's identity and freedoms were forged through long-term pressure and collective struggle, not through fate.

Taiwan's "geothermal democracy" treats political tensions as normal and channels them into collaboration, she said. It is a model she wants AI to follow by easing division and linking communities.

German-Swedish philanthropist Jakob von Uexküll created the Right Livelihood award in 1980 after the foundation behind the Nobel Prizes declined to add new categories for environment and international development.