To help her run for Congress in 2024, US Democrat Shamaine Daniels has hired an AI volunteer called “Ashley.”
Ashley is a one-of-a-kind political phone banker created by Civox. She uses generative AI technology, which is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to make sure that all of her answers are real and not pre-recorded.
Ashley’s high-tech tools let her have an infinite number of personalized talks with voters in real time. As a volunteer for Daniels’ campaign, Ashley has already reached out to thousands of people in Pennsylvania. Ilya Mouzykantskii, CEO of Civox, thinks that AI callers will quickly become popular. By the end of the year, he wants them to make tens of thousands of calls every day.
Ashley clearly tells people that she is an AI bot when she talks to them, even though U.S. law doesn’t require her to do so. Her voice sounds very robotic. Civox hasn’t said which generative AI models were used for Ashley, but they have said they used more than 20 models, some of which were open source and some of which were private, and trained them on data that was available on the internet.
As we get closer to the 2024 elections, the use of AI in political campaigns has become a controversial topic. Because of worries about deepfakes made by AI, U.S. senators introduced a bill in October to punish people who make material using AI without permission.
Therefore, Google requires political campaign ads to say when they use AI, and Meta doesn’t let political marketers use generative AI tools for making ads. This is to stop the spread of false information.
As people continue to talk about AI in politics, new studies have shown that AI could have a big effect on how people feel about politics. A study from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center looked at how AI could affect social media.
Another study from Europe found that Microsoft’s Bing AI robot, now called Copilot, gave wrong information about elections 30% of the time.
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