Reliable Information Is a Prerequisite for Self-Government

For Vivian Schiller, the question linking her career in news media to Aspen Digital is not simply how to preserve journalism as an industry. It is how people come to know what they know—and whether they can obtain the reliable, independent information required to govern themselves.

Schiller traces her career through Discovery, The New York Times, NPR, NBC, Twitter, and other roles, after beginning as a Russian interpreter in the former Soviet Union. Looking back, she sees a coherent thread in what had initially felt like a series of “happy accidents”: following the changing tools through which information is created, distributed, and understood. At Aspen, that background has converged with the work she most values: bringing people from different organizations and sectors together to grapple with difficult questions and identify paths forward.

For Schiller, media and technology are not merely engines of innovation. They shape the conditions in which democratic life is possible. She points to a definition of journalism associated with Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach: journalism provides “the information that citizens need to be free and self-governing.” Being free and self-governing, she says, is democracy’s core.

The priority, in her account, is public access to fair, reliable, independent, and impartial information: information people need to vote, participate in civic life, make decisions about schools, and live in cohesive communities. The information environment also mediates every other policy field. People understand health, education, energy, the environment, and public services through the information to which they have access; when that information degrades, so does their understanding of those subjects.

Schiller distinguishes sharply between local and national news. National news can be polarizing, she says. By contrast, she says surveys have found correlations between strong independent local news organizations, greater civic engagement, and less polarization. Her explanation centers on proximity: local journalists live in the communities they cover, encounter their audiences in ordinary life, and report on practical matters such as schools, weather, and local sports alongside civic affairs.

That local connection is also why Schiller sees local news as the most promising long-term response to declining trust in media. She describes that decline as the result of several overlapping forces: repeated claims that media institutions are dishonest, social media’s amplification of those attacks, low-quality material in people’s feeds, and wider political polarization. There is no single remedy, she says, but local reporting can sustain trust because it remains embedded in community life.

When Lorelle Atkinson asks why communications was among the Aspen Institute’s earliest policy programs, Schiller’s answer is that communications has always shaped the filter through which people understand the world.

The original Communications and Society program worked on questions that would now often sit within the domain of the FCC: telecommunications, satellite systems, broadband connectivity, and access to education, public services, and information. Connecting rural communities mattered because a lack of connectivity could isolate people from the networks through which they learn, receive services, and participate in public life.

The institutional through line was broader than physical infrastructure. Schiller says that news media and access to information had been part of the work from the beginning, even before “information ecosystem” became common terminology. The basic questions have persisted as technologies changed: how information travels, who can access it, and what follows when its quality declines.

Schiller had participated in Communications and Society programs for roughly 12 or 13 years before joining the Aspen Institute. When she arrived—six years and three and a half weeks before this discussion, by her count—she was hired to consolidate Communications and Society with an existing cybersecurity program, the Institute for Urban Innovation, and several smaller efforts without a clear common home.

The mandate was deliberately open-ended. Schiller says she was asked to examine the portfolio, determine where there was promise, and be prepared to begin again if it did not cohere. She describes finding work that needed “nurturing and care and feeding,” particularly cybersecurity, which she says is now much larger than it was when she arrived.

Aspen Digital became the umbrella for that consolidated work. Schiller says the name was intended to be broad enough for a changing portfolio—while avoiding an acronym. Some current work does not fit neatly under “digital,” she acknowledges. But the portfolio is held together by the way technological change affects information systems, institutions, and policy fields.

Vivian Schiller describes AI not as a single program area but as a through line in nearly everything Aspen Digital does. The group’s work includes cybersecurity, journalism and news institutions, societal trust, workplace innovation, and projects explicitly focused on artificial intelligence. It also increasingly works with other Aspen Institute programs on how AI intersects with their policy concerns.

The distinction matters because Aspen Digital is not primarily trying to teach people how to use a chatbot in their day-to-day work. Its focus is on how AI affects the institutions and domains in which people already work: information, safety, privacy, public policy, and the specific fields addressed across the Institute.

The workplace initiative is Aspen Digital’s largest grant to date, Schiller says. A $75 million grant from Pivotal will launch the WIN Challenge—Workplace Innovation Now—with $60 million to be awarded for large initiatives intended to advance workplace innovation.

Generative AI—tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—is the form of AI most people encounter directly. Schiller says it is increasingly woven into ordinary life and has major implications for the information ecosystem. But she does not treat chatbots as the whole of AI. She points instead to scientific and research applications, including drug development, health and medicine, and efforts to understand outer space, the ocean, and other aspects of the world.

Shared Futures reflects that wider view. The initiative examines AI and creativity while also engaging with intellectual-property questions and other risks. Schiller points to potential effects on filmmaking, music, the arts, fashion design, and spirituality, describing those creative possibilities as exciting even as Aspen Digital works on AI’s risks.

The AI danger most readily imagined is a spectacular deepfake: fabricated video or audio of a prominent person that triggers an immediate political or geopolitical crisis. Vivian Schiller is less concerned by that scenario. Highly visible fabrications, she argues, are likely to be identified and debunked quickly.

Her greater concern is slower and more pervasive. As people encounter more wholly fabricated material—and material that mixes real and false elements—they may become less confident that anything can be known to be true. Atkinson raises the example of a seven-year-old seeing AI-generated material on YouTube Kids and being unable to distinguish it from reality. Schiller treats that repeated exposure to uncertain material as more consequential than a singular viral hoax.

Schiller calls the dynamic the “liar’s dividend.” The concept predates generative AI, she says. Its logic is to flood the information environment with disputes about things that are demonstrably true, plant doubt, and leave people unsure whether they can trust what they see. AI, in her view, makes that process possible at industrial scale.

In that vacuum, Schiller says, a liar, autocrat, or other manipulative figure can present themselves as the sole authority: do not trust your own eyes; listen to me instead. The pattern itself is not new, she adds; it has appeared over the past century and before. What AI changes is the scale and ease of manufacturing uncertainty.

The practical response she recommends is skepticism, not blanket distrust of journalism or institutions. People should inspect sources and recognize how much unreliable material can circulate in feeds, whether AI-generated “slop,” bot activity, or other forms of manipulation. Schiller adds that some online rancor is amplified by adversarial information attacks from outside the United States by actors seeking to undermine American democracy.

Aspen Digital’s Take 9 campaign applies a related principle to fraud and scams: before responding to an urgent message, pause for nine seconds. A request apparently sent by an executive asking an employee to buy gift cards is an obvious example. The broader point is to interrupt the pressure to act before checking whether a message is legitimate.

Schiller also makes a case for engaging with AI rather than avoiding it. She acknowledges that environmental issues are difficult, but says experimenting with these systems and understanding both their capabilities and shortcomings is necessary for understanding the world people already inhabit. Children, friends, colleagues, and institutions are using AI; familiarity with it is therefore essential, in her view, for people whose work concerns information, policy, or social institutions.

Vivian Schiller describes Aspen Digital’s method in a polarized environment as creating conditions in which people with conflicting interests and views can speak candidly. She says she did not fully recognize the power of the Aspen Institute’s name until she became an employee, despite having participated in its programs for about 20 years.

But institutional trust, in her account, must be sustained through conduct. If a discussion is held under Chatham House Rule or off the record, Aspen must honor that commitment. Participants need to know they will be heard rather than shut down and treated with dignity and respect.

That approach, Schiller says, has allowed the organization to convene people across political divisions, competing technology companies, competing news institutions, and other sectors. The aim is not agreement for its own sake. It is to give participants room to lower their guard, grapple with difficult issues, and hear one another in a setting they regard as safe.

Schiller sees that method as aligned with both the Aspen Institute’s founding intentions and the original principles of Communications and Society. Satellite connectivity and broadband have been joined by AI, cyber threats, synthetic media, fraud, press freedom, and societal trust. Yet she sees continuity rather than a break: the enduring task is maintaining broad dialogue and understanding about the world and examining how technology affects nearly everything within it.