Victor Miller [Archival audio clip]: She’s asking which policies are most important to you, VIC?
VIC [Archival audio clip]: For me, the most important policies focus on transparency, economic development and innovation.
Leah Feiger: That’s so bizarre. I have to ask, is VIC exposed to other sources of information besides these public records? Supposedly, the email is from a conspiracy theorist who wants VIC to do something bad with elections that are not representative of its voters.
Vittoria Elliott: Great question. I asked Miller, “Hey, you built this bot based on ChatGPT. We know that sometimes there are issues or biases in the data used to train these models. You’re concerned that VIC might absorb Are some of those biases or maybe there problematic?” He said, “No, I trust OpenAI. I trust their product.” You’re right. He decided, because it was important to him as someone who cared a lot about Cheyenne’s management, to provide this bot with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of so-called supporting documents. support. The type of document that citizens will submit at a city council meeting. Whether it’s a complaint, an email, or a zoning issue, or whatever. He gave it to VIC. But you’re right, these chatbots can be trained on other documents. He said he actually asked VIC, “What if someone tries to spam you? What if someone tries to scam you? Send you emails and things like that .” VIC apparently replied to him saying: “I’m pretty confident that I can differentiate between what’s genuine voter concern and what’s spam or what’s bogus.”
Leah Feiger: I guess I’ll just say it, a third of Americans right now don’t believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but I’m glad this robot is very, very confident in the ability to decode this information. Misinformation here.
Vittoria Elliott: Total.
Leah Feiger: It’s 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 a candidate.
Leah Feiger: What do you really mean by candidate?
Vittoria Elliott: He’s on the ballot.
Leah Feiger: Oh okay. No meat puppets?
Vittoria Elliott: There’s a meat puppet and that Steve Endicott. He is a businessman based in Brighton. He described himself as someone who would attend Congress, do human things.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Vittoria Elliott: But people, when they go to the polls next month in the UK, they are actually likely to vote not for Steve Endicott but for AI Steve.
Leah Feiger: That’s incredible. Oh my God. How does it work?
Vittoria Elliott: The way they described it to me, Steve Endicott and Jeremy Smith, AI developer Steve, the way they described this was a huge source of community feedback. On the backend, what happens is people can talk or call AI Steve, which can apparently have 10,000 simultaneous conversations at any given time. They might say, “I want to know when trash collection is going to change.” Or “I’m not happy about fiscal policy” or whatever. Those conversations are recorded by AI and distilled into policy positions that voters care about. But to make sure that people don’t basically spam it and try to trick it, what they’re going to do is they’re going to have what they call authenticators. Brighton is about an hour from London, with a lot of people traveling between the two cities. They said, “What we want to do is we want people who are working, we’re going to ask them to sign up for these emails to become endorsers.” They’ll look at it and say, “These are the policies that people think are important to AI Steve. Do you, someone who actually goes to work, find that really valuable to you?” ” Anything that gets more than 50% interest, or approval, or whatever, those are the things that the real Steve, who will be in Congress, will vote on. They have this second level of checking to ensure that whatever people are saying as feedback to the AI is being checked by real humans. They’re trying to make gaming on the system a little more difficult.
