We live in political times, which is an observation that isn’t diminished by the fact that in many democracies a lot of people don’t care about politics at all. We know this because  of voter turnout numbers, a measure of what is the most minimal level of political involvement.

This is a point I first started thinking seriously about twenty years ago while reviewing the pollster Michael Adams’s book American Backlash. “Non-voters are the majority non-party in American politics,” I said in my review. At the time, the most recent presidential election had been in 2004, which felt like another very political time, what with George W. Bush running for a second term after the Iraq War. As a percentage of the voting-age population though the turnout was only 56.7%. In 2024 it was 59%, which was actually down 3.8% from the 2020 presidential election.

In the U.K. general elections in 2024 the voter turnout was nearly the same at 60%, which was the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.

Canada does a little better federally, averaging in the mid-60s in the last couple of decades. But again, these numbers are all national. At the state and provincial level the numbers drop considerably. In Ontario’s just finished provincial election the voter turnout was 45.4% of eligible voters. This was one percent higher than the last provincial election, which was the lowest voter turnout in the history of our provincial elections.

Drill down to the municipal level and the numbers drop even further. In my hometown’s last municipal election in 2022 only 28% of eligible voters voted. A number that was down 8% from 2018! The 2023 mayoral election in Toronto had a turnout of 38%. To take a random municipal election from the U.K., the turnout for the Sunderland City Council election in 2024 was 30.8%. The 2024 mayoral election for London hit 40.5%.

What this seems to underline is the fact that, to invert the famous adage often associated with the American politician Tip O’Neill that all politics is local, today all politics is national. Just as local news media have been dying, leaving no one covering city hall, the public’s attention has been focused more and more exclusively on politics at the national level. And with the importance of the Internet to fundraising this has only become more pronounced.

This is something I find very concerning, for reasons that I’ve talked about before. Chief among these is the fact that a lot of national political debate is of less direct consequence to citizens than what is going on at the local level, and that if no one is paying attention to what’s happening locally you’re opening the door to a level of corruption that (I think) would shock people if they were aware of it. I know I’ve been shocked by it when I’ve had dealings with local government in both rural and urban areas. You know things are bad when a single family has half-a-dozen members filling different jobs on council. But it’s rare to get reporting on this in places that have become “news deserts.”

But to go back to where I started, it’s been locked in for decades now that slightly more than a third of all eligible voters in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. do not vote and will never vote. If non-voters were a party they would win every election. And that’s at the federal level. On the provincial or municipal level the non-voter party would win landslide majorities. Does this constitute a functional democracy?

If so, I think it’s one that could be improved. In the lead-up to Ontario’s recent provincial election. the Toronto.com website had a poll asking people who seldom or never vote why they don’t vote. 62.5% said their vote wouldn’t make any difference. They are right to be so disillusioned. The three English-speaking jurisdictions I’ve been talking about all use a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than one based on proportional representation. In Germany, which has a proportional representation system, the 2025 general election had a voter turnout of 82.5%, which is the highest since German reunification.

I think proportional representation is a better system, but there’s no chance the political parties will allow it to happen here, as public apathy to it as an issue means there’s no call for change. That non-voting party seems to want to keep their official status of invisibility.

A few weeks ago I found a post on another site where someone had asked an AI to write a film review. The results were what I think you might expect: a bland, clichéd summary of opinion such as you’d get from a review aggregator.

The reason this is what you’d expect is because the way these programs work (and I’m aware that people who understand this field better don’t even consider it to be AI) is to just take all the data there is on a subject and melt it down to something that sounds like a general consensus. So of course it’s going to be clichéd and derivative. Cliché is, by definition, the most common form of expression in the datasets from which it draws on.

What we’re left with is the hive mind, which is where we were heading anyway what with review aggregators and the like. The “wisdom of crowds” is a distillation not of the best that has been thought and said but of everything that’s been thought and said. And I think for a lot of people, and for different purposes, that may be good enough. For people who read genre fiction by the bale, those looking for executive summaries of generally held views, or students looking for a precis.

In the field of aesthetic response or opinion writing, however, is this the best we can expect? I started thinking about this because of an article I read online at the Yahoo! Sports page covering NFL football. I originally pulled a blank on the byline “Castmagic.” Was that a person? People have lots of strange names these days so I thought it possible. But when I clicked on the link to read it I found this:

(This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

I immediately had some questions. It was just a short opinion piece, so what did it mean that it was written “with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team”? My own sense was that it was written entirely by AI and just proofread and copyedited for factual errors or anything that might get Yahoo! in trouble. I also wondered if this was a direction more news organizations, and not just Internet ones, were going to be heading in.

The subject of the piece was the New York Giants football team. The Giants were a very bad team last year, resulting in their having a high pick in the upcoming draft. They don’t have a clear starting quarterback on their roster and it’s usually assumed that a team in such a situation will pick the best QB on their draft board as this is the most important position to have filled. So the question posed to “Castmagic” was “Is it time for the Giants to draft a quarterback?”

Things didn’t get off to a good start: “As the dust settles from the 2024 NFL season, it’s evident that some teams face more pivotal offseasons than others.”

Well, duh. We’re hit in the face with a cliché right off the bat, followed up by an obvious truism. I didn’t need an AI to tell me this.

As “Castmagic” went along it mostly borrowed from an earlier column on the same subject written by one of Yahoo!’s (human) sports writers. But if I’d been that particular writer I don’t think I’d look at this as being the sincerest form of flattery. I’d probably be worried for my job.

Did “Chatmagic” have any original insights to offer on the question of whether the Giants should draft a QB? No. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, the Giants’ path forward hinges on navigating the delicate balance between short-term success and long-term strategic planning. Whether through drafting a quarterback or trading down to solidify the entire roster, the Giants face decisions that could define the franchise for years to come. Only time will reveal if they choose wisely.

Really? That’s the takeaway? The Giants have options and “only time will tell” if they make the right choice?

Will “Chatmagic” get better? I think it will, if only because I don’t see how it can get any worse. Or less useful. But I think these early, baby steps give some indication of the issues going forward, at least when it comes to this form of writing. How can an opinion of any value on any subject be fashioned out of a dataset that is just a collection of everybody else’s opinion? These programs aren’t interested in original insights or finding out the truth. Are they even capable of that? Only time will tell . In the meanwhile, what we have now reads like a page of Google search results, just the repackaging of random information, some of which is no doubt total garbage, into a paste of content that you can skim your eyes over before clicking onto what’s next.

There were some 50 comments on the article the last time I checked. Most of them piling on the “dummies” who write sports opinions for Yahoo! Only one of them registered that it had been written by an AI.