Stacey Abrams spoke about democracy in the age of AI at her fireside chat at the 2025 AFROTECH Conference in Houston.
Abrams served in the Georgia House from 2007 to 2017, led the caucus as House Minority Leader from 2011 to 2017, as well as made history as the first Black woman to secure a major-party governor nomination in Georgia in 2018. She later founded Fair Fight Action to expand voting access.
On Wednesday, Abrams and Rachel Gillum, vice president of Ethical & Humane Use of Technology at Salesforce, discussed AI and how democratic guardrails can steer technology toward equitable prosperity during the “Democracy in the World of AI with Stacey Abrams” session.
Stacey Abrams is using her new novel to explore the ethics of AI
Abrams began with her childhood, sharing that her mother referred to their economic status as “gentile poor.” Reading books and watching PBS stood in for wealth and taught Abrams that escaping poverty should be possible for everyone. The belief that “poverty is immoral, economically inefficient and solvable” is what fuels her companies, her organizing and her writing.
She chose to use fiction as a doorway, not a detour. Coded Justice, her new thriller that she released in July, walks them through the hard conversations about democracy and technology.
“Storytelling is for me the most effective means of not only firing the imagination, but also helping people envision what is possible,” Abrams said. “A thriller for me is the most exciting way to get people to eat their vegetables.”
Stacey Abrams warned that AI can become a tool for authoritarianism
Abrams noted that whoever controls information controls outcomes and that AI will amplify whichever system the people choose.
“Democracy decides what information is available because in an authoritarian regime, we limit access to information. In a democracy, information is free-flowing,” she said. “If we do not control for and defend democracy, AI becomes a tool for authoritarianism. It becomes a tool for constraining knowledge, for constraining access and for constraining how our lived experiences and how our lives are actually guided.”
Abrams then challenged the room to learn from the last tech cycle, noting that if people choose to skip the basic questions upfront, they’ll inherit someone else’s answers later.
“What, how, when, who? Those are important questions we should ask of any technology. Think about what we could have had if we had asked those questions when the internet was first starting out,” she said. “If we do not ask those questions, we have to live with the answers someone else gives us. And once those answers become embedded in how our lives are experienced, then we have to worry about someone throttling the algorithm on our TikTok feed, we get stuck and we never get to see anything we want to see.”
This led Abrams to share that markets optimize for returns, while governments and ethics protect people — and how both are needed.
“As an entrepreneur, I believe in the ability to ideate, to build, to launch a product,” she said. “But my responsibility as a citizen means that the safety of my customers, the safety of my community has to be paramount. AI should be held to those same standards.”
She emphasized the values that should guide those rules and refused to frame DEI as a hiring memo.
“DEI is the DNA of America,” she said. “It is how we have constructed a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-identity nation. And so those who are attacking DEI are attacking the nature of who we intend to be as a country. In 17 years, we are a multiracial nation that has no racial majority.”
Stacey Abrams emphasized the importance of familiarizing ourselves with AI
Abrams pointed out that without AI literacy, communities cannot contest outcomes that shape their days. Knowledge is the lever that keeps agency intact.
“When we are afraid of knowledge, when we are afraid of technology, we tend to isolate ourselves from it, which does not mean it does not exist. We simply lose control over it,” she said. “Our communities at this moment must understand what might supplant them, but more importantly, they need to understand what will determine their days.”
Finally, Abrams turned to the people building the tools: “One, we have to ask, ‘How are we training these models? Are these models being trained on knowledge that reflects our needs, our communities, our values, our understanding?'” she said.