An AI-Generated Candidate Wants to Run For Mayor in Wyoming (futurism.com) 48
An anonymous reader shared this report from Futurism:
An AI chatbot named VIC, or Virtually Integrated Citizen, is trying to make it onto the ballot in this year's mayoral election for Wyoming's capital city of Cheyenne.
But as reported by Wired, Wyoming's secretary of state is battling against VIC's legitimacy as a candidate — and now, an investigation is underway.
According to Wired, VIC, which was built on OpenAI's GPT-4 and trained on thousands of documents gleaned from Cheyenne council meetings, was created by Cheyenne resident and library worker Victor Miller. Should VIC win, Miller told Wired that he'll serve as the bot's "meat puppet," operating the AI but allowing it to make decisions for the capital city.... "My campaign promise," Miller told Wired, "is he's going to do 100 percent of the voting on these big, thick documents that I'm not going to read and that I don't think people in there right now are reading...."
Unfortunately for the AI and its — his? — meat puppet, however, they've already made some political enemies, most notably Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray. As Gray, who has challenged the legality of the bot, told Wired in a statement, all mayoral candidates need to meet the requirements of a "qualified elector." This "necessitates being a real person," Gray argues... Per Wired, it's also run amuck with OpenAI, which says the AI violates the company's "policies against political campaigning." (Miller told Wired that he'll move VIC to Meta's open-source Llama 3 model if need be, which seems a bit like VIC will turn into a different candidate entirely.)
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle offers more details: [H]is dad helped him design the best system for VIC. Using his $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription, Miller had an 8,000-character limit to feed VIC supporting documents that would make it an effective mayoral candidate...
While on the phone with Miller, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle also interviewed VIC itself. When asked whether AI technology is better suited for elected office than humans, VIC said a hybrid solution is the best approach. "As an AI, I bring unique strengths to the role, such as impartial decision-making, data-driven policies and the ability to analyze information rapidly and accurately," VIC said. "However, it's important to recognize the value of human experience and empathy and leadership. So ideally, an AI and human partnership would be the most beneficial for Cheyenne...." The artificial intelligence said this unique approach could pave a new pathway for the integration of human leadership and advanced technology in politics.
But as reported by Wired, Wyoming's secretary of state is battling against VIC's legitimacy as a candidate — and now, an investigation is underway.
According to Wired, VIC, which was built on OpenAI's GPT-4 and trained on thousands of documents gleaned from Cheyenne council meetings, was created by Cheyenne resident and library worker Victor Miller. Should VIC win, Miller told Wired that he'll serve as the bot's "meat puppet," operating the AI but allowing it to make decisions for the capital city.... "My campaign promise," Miller told Wired, "is he's going to do 100 percent of the voting on these big, thick documents that I'm not going to read and that I don't think people in there right now are reading...."
Unfortunately for the AI and its — his? — meat puppet, however, they've already made some political enemies, most notably Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray. As Gray, who has challenged the legality of the bot, told Wired in a statement, all mayoral candidates need to meet the requirements of a "qualified elector." This "necessitates being a real person," Gray argues... Per Wired, it's also run amuck with OpenAI, which says the AI violates the company's "policies against political campaigning." (Miller told Wired that he'll move VIC to Meta's open-source Llama 3 model if need be, which seems a bit like VIC will turn into a different candidate entirely.)
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle offers more details: [H]is dad helped him design the best system for VIC. Using his $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription, Miller had an 8,000-character limit to feed VIC supporting documents that would make it an effective mayoral candidate...
While on the phone with Miller, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle also interviewed VIC itself. When asked whether AI technology is better suited for elected office than humans, VIC said a hybrid solution is the best approach. "As an AI, I bring unique strengths to the role, such as impartial decision-making, data-driven policies and the ability to analyze information rapidly and accurately," VIC said. "However, it's important to recognize the value of human experience and empathy and leadership. So ideally, an AI and human partnership would be the most beneficial for Cheyenne...." The artificial intelligence said this unique approach could pave a new pathway for the integration of human leadership and advanced technology in politics.
Double Standard (Score:2)
Necessitates being a "real person", like, say, a corporation? Funny how they're people when it's convenient for them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Double Standard (Score:5, Informative)
A corporation is a board of directors which are actual people.
But the actual point of a corporation is to separate the people from the corporation itself. That is the reason corporations exist, to shield the people from liability.
A cat cannot run for office.
Cats, and dogs, and mules, and goats, and inanimate objects (like foot powder) can indeed run for office [wikipedia.org], and be elected. Some of them get reelected, as well.
If the AI begins taking bribes and abusing its office, who goes to prison?
Re: (Score:2)
History suggests you study it at little closer [wikipedia.org]. Or not. Maybe you enjoy looking ignorant.
Unworkable: not amenable to normal corruption. (Score:2)
For the establishment, there must be ways to influence the votes even of independent representatives. A mayor, Congress critter or whatever making decisions based purely on their analysis of the facts and the wishes of its electorate would be an unacceptable challenge to the status quo. Ways must and will be found by the existing power brokers to kill this idea.
Re: (Score:2)
You'd have to teach AI to lie. That's unacceptable.
Only real politicians can lie when in office.
Re: (Score:2)
Can a corporation serve as mayor of Wyoming?
Re: (Score:2)
A corporation isn't considered a real person, it's an entity. Entities do have rights and obligations under the law, but they aren't people and can't hold office.
Re: (Score:2)
A corporation is a fictitious legal person, not a real person. This means they can sue and be sued, own property and debt, stuff like that. You almost certainly live in an incorporated territory, where the local government could sue you or you could sue them.
Lots of places have a mayor that is not a real human person https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
This is not cute. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This is not cute. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re:This is not cute. (Score:4, Interesting)
Had to make it a stunt... (Score:2)
For political offices of any nontrivial complexity it's already more or les necessarily the case that you aren't just voting for the candidate; but for the candidate and the sort of staff and advisors he would associate with. It's not necessarily common, but would be totally above board, for a candidate to be quite specific about who they
The meat puppet is running (Score:4, Informative)
Even if they did somehow allow the AI itself to run for mayor (obviously problematic) the "meat puppet" is still effecting a lot of control via prompt engineering and rerunning queries when the AI comes up with a bad/nonsense answer.
Re: (Score:2)
i think most politicians should be replaced (Score:3)
Re:i think most politicians should be replaced (Score:4, Insightful)
Further no AI regardless of how it's made would be better than the current set up. Why? Because those desiring control will gladly reprogram it for their own ends. Politicians / Hackers / Enemy state operatives / etc. At bare minimum, those "bureaucracies that cause much unneeded expense" (Care to say which ones?) will be preserved as long as those with control continue to profit off of them.
TL;DR: The AI magic wand isn't the solution to your problems.
Re:i think most politicians should be replaced (Score:4, Interesting)
Those AIs would be pulling their answers / decisions from the same cesspool that is known as the Internet. GIGO. Do you actually want the likes of Reddit and 4chan making decisions about troop deployments or economic development?
The state of Missouri came within five votes of disbanding the DMV (with no provision to moves its functions to another agency - within a year, there would be no legal way for Missourians to drive) for "conspiring with the UN to take our guns away." The reason? Some state senator's wife read about it on the internet.
Where do you believe current politicians pull their answers from (other than out of their asses)?
Re: i think most politicians should be replaced (Score:2)
Got a link to that story? I couldn't find one.
I'm wondering if the bill also removed all the requirements for driving like licensing and registration.
Re: (Score:2)
Got a link to that story? I couldn't find one.
It was quite some time ago, like 20 years. So no, not right off hand.
I'm wondering if the bill also removed all the requirements for driving like licensing and registration.
It did not. They were in a hurry, because, as noted, the DMV were "conspiring with the UN to take our guns away." An emergency, and all, because we all know how quickly the UN moves in their troops to conquer their victims. It was on the internet, so it must be true. They can't put it on the internet if it's not true, you know.
This, and the bill that passed (the governor vetoed it) that made it a felony for federal law enforcement to enfor
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Going from the tyranny of corruption to the tyranny of AI. No thanks!
I've seen enough AI to know that it doesn't function well in reality. The edge cases are a disaster. You don't want it babysitting your kids, picking meals for you, or building your website.
Re: (Score:2)
Most politicians could be replaced by a dartboard, with monkeys throwing their poo at it, and it would be an improvement.
AIs may well hallucinate less than the average politicians, at least.
A policy question (Score:1)
If I was to tell someone to run for office, officially draft intent letters with the candidate's name, write all their platform ideas..... Does that candidate pass the tiring test?
The people who do these stunts need to be fined (Score:2)
And not a slap on the fingers. An amount that will teach them to never do it again. I am tired of people sabotaging public discourse. You're not clever, funny or sneaky.
Age? (Score:2)
In addition to all the other reasons this stunt shouldn't be allowed, Wyoming requires you be at least 18 to hold any public office.
In today's AI world this is a stunt! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
And this makes it different from human politicians and their lobbyists how?
No, an AI is not a thing (Score:1, Offtopic)
First, there's no aritificial intelligence. There's regugurgitated processed speech. So yes, if you took the typewriters of the monkeys and processed its output, you'd get coherent-sounding speech. It wouldn't be the speech of a person (or a corporation). It just regurgitated text.
Second, all these idiots wanting AI to "own a copyright" or "file a trademark" or "run for office" need to understand that there's no such thing as AI. It's a buzzword to get the hedge funds to give money. It's not real. So
Re: (Score:2)
AI doesn't mean what you want it to mean. From the moment McCarthy coined the term, it refereed exclusively to the very things you are annoyed that people call 'AI'. If it makes you feel any better, there were people at the Dartmouth conference that didn't like the term, but the objectors either relented or gave up.
So, yes, we do have AI. We've had AI for ~70 years. What we don't have is the science fiction version of AI. That's because it's fiction.
As for TFA, you are right that we don't have anythin
Idly womdering who was first (Score:2)
"Brighton general election candidate aims to be UK’s first ‘AI MP"
https://www.theguardian.com/po... [theguardian.com]
8000 Character limit? (Score:2)
My Tandy Color Computer 2 from 1982 had a larger character limit (about 24000 give or take in Extended Color Basic 2.0 on a 64K machine). What useful information can be fed in with only 8000 characters?
We are talking about replacing a politician (Score:2)
so here, presumably, AI stands for Artificial Idiocy not Artificial Intelligence.
Re: (Score:2)
Here? When does it not stand for that?
Title is idiotic (Score:3)
Some people are soft in the head. Some non-trivial percentage of those write stories for Futurism.
The so-called AI Candidate does not want anything. The "wanting" is all on the part of the real human (for sufficiently loose definitions of ...) who dreamed up the stunt.
Decision Tree Logic (Score:4, Insightful)
> An AI-Generated Candidate Wants to Run For Mayor in Wyoming
It wants to run for mayor as much as automated voice systems want to help you with your problems.
Revulsion (Score:2)
It can't be AI. It has to be a dog (Score:2)
Idyllwild, California elected a dog as a mayor.
The number of people who *want* ... (Score:2)