Elections will never be the same again, as there’s now AI to contend with as a political persuasion tool.
In her run for Congress, Democrat Shamaine Daniels deployed the first AI-powered campaign caller.
The AI chatbot is called ‘Ashley’ and is capable of having conversations without any recorded lines. To make them even more persuasive, ‘Ashley’ analyzes voter’s profiles to better approach the key issues they care about.
From a Reuters report:
“Democrat Shamaine Daniels is running for Congress, eyeing a seat held by Trump-aligned Republican Representative Scott Perry, who played a key role challenging the 2020 election results.
Daniels, who lost to Perry by less than 10 points last year, hopes a new weapon will help her underdog candidacy: Ashley, an artificial intelligence campaign volunteer.”
[…]
“This is going to scale fast,” said 30-year-old Ilya Mouzykantskii, the London-based CEO of Civox, the company behind Ashley. “We intend to be making tens of thousands of calls a day by the end of the year and into the six digits pretty soon. This is coming for the 2024 election and it’s coming in a very big way. … The future is now.”
Daniels’ is using the political AI chatbot to “understand voters better, reach out in different languages (Ashley is fluent in over 20), and conduct many more “high bandwidth” conversations”. Fortunately, even though they’re not legally required yet, Ashley’s makers are disclosing to voters the fact that they’re talking to an AI chatbot and not a real person.
As for generative AI’s tendency to invent plausible-sounding facts on the fly, something which will undoubtedly work great in a political campaign? As the Zen master says, we’ll see how it works out.
Main photo of Shamaine Daniels, via her Facebook account
Also read: Arthur C Clarke’s Future Predictions From Decades Ago Are Still Amazingly Accurate
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