Victor Miller (archive audio clip): She asks which policies are most important to you, VIC.
VIC (Audio Clip File): The most important policies for me focus on transparency, economic development and innovation.
Lea Feiger: That’s so strange. I have to ask, could VIC be exposed to other sources of information besides these public records? Say, an email from a conspiracy theorist who wants VIC to do something not so good with an election that wouldn’t represent their constituents.
Vittoria Elliott: Big question. I asked Miller, “Hey, you built this bot on ChatGPT. We know that sometimes there are issues or biases in the data that is used to train these models. Are you worried that VIC might absorb some of those biases or that there might be some of those biases?” Will they be problems?” He said, “No, I trust OpenAI. I believe in their product.” You’re right. He decided, because of what is important to him as someone who cares deeply about the Cheyenne government, to feed this robot hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of what are called supporting documents. The kind of documents people will present at a town hall meeting. Whether it’s a complaint, an email, a zoning issue or whatever. He passed it on to VIC. But you are right, these chatbots can be trained with other material. He said he actually asked VIC, “What if someone tries to spam you? What if someone tries to trick you? Send you emails and stuff.” VIC apparently responded by saying, “I’m pretty confident I can tell what is a real concern of voters and what is spam or not real.”
Lea Feiger: I guess I’d just say that a third of Americans right now don’t believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but I’m really glad that this bot is very, very confident in its ability to decipher dis and misinformation here.
Vittoria Elliott: Completely.
Lea Feiger: That was VIC in Wyoming. Tell us a little more about AI Steve in the UK. How is it different from VIC?
Vittoria Elliott: For one thing, AI Steve is actually the candidate.
Lea Feiger: What do you really mean by candidate?
Vittoria Elliott: It’s on the ballot.
Lea Feiger: Ah OK. Is there no meat puppet?
Vittoria Elliott: There’s a meat puppet, and that Steve Endicott. He is a businessman based in Brighton. He describes himself as the person who will attend Parliament and do human things.
Lea Feiger: Sure.
Vittoria Elliott: But people, when they go to vote next month in the UK, will actually have the chance to vote not for Steve Endicott, but for AI Steve.
Lea Feiger: That is incredible. Oh Lord. How does it work?
Vittoria Elliott: The way it was described to me by Steve Endicott and Jeremy Smith, who is the developer of AI Steve, it’s like a big community feedback grab. On the backend, what happens is that people can talk or call AI Steve, apparently they can have 10,000 simultaneous conversations at any given time. They may say, “I want to know when garbage collection will be different.” Or “I’m upset about tax policy,” or whatever. These conversations are transcribed by AI and distilled into these are the political positions that interest voters. But to make sure that people don’t basically spam you and try to trick you, what they’re going to do is have what they call validators. Brighton is about an hour from London and many people travel between the two cities. They said, “What we want to do is have people who are on your journey, we’ll ask them to sign up for these emails to be validators.” They’ll look at it and say, “These are the policies that people say are important to AI Steve. Do you, a regular commuter, find that really valuable to you?” Anything that gets more than 50% interest, or approval, or whatever, that’s what the real Steve, who will be in Parliament, will vote for. They have this second level of controls to make sure that anything people say as feedback to the AI is verified by real humans. They’re trying to make it a little harder for them to game the system.