Over the last month, some Spanish-speaking New Yorkers got a recorded phone call from Mayor Eric Adams speaking their native language. “Hola, soy el alcalde Eric Adams,” the mayor says in a monotone but flawless accent, before launching into a pitch for jobs with the city government. The truth is Adams isn’t multilingual, but he is a pioneer in the AI politics race.
In October, the mayor’s office said he’s been using AI to blast his constituents with millions of robocalls in languages he doesn’t speak, including Yiddish, Spanish, Mandarin, Haitian Creole, and Cantonese.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I would be offended to get an AI robocall from a politician, and it would make me less likely to vote for them, even if they were from the party I support.
It’s because it is an insult to your intelligence.
Yep “I spent zero effort on you and I think you’re stupid enough to feel special about a robocall”
Even if that politician called me personally I would feel this way. This is a statement about robocalls more than about AI.
However if they had a ChatGPT style interface for asking them in depth policy questions that would answer as they would answer, I would be all fucking in. That would be awesome.
Except it wouldn’t. It would tell you what they calculated that you wanted to hear—just like they do in debates.
The real role of current-gen AI in politics should be mainly summarizing the text of laws and bills, so even people who don’t have the time to read everything can stay more or less in the picture, and ask specific questions about the text.
This is just idiocy. You can trick an AI into saying literally anything.
