An AI-Generated Candidate Wants to Run For Mayor in Wyoming

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.