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Sprint projectMay 5, 2024

AI Politician

David Abecassis, Felix Michalak, Nguyen Dang Nhat Anh, Zhiyi Xu · Team AI Politician

Submitted to AI and Democracy Hackathon: Demonstrating the Risks. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

This project explores the potential for AI chatbots to enhance participative democracy by allowing a politician to engage with a large number of constituents in personalized conversations at scale. By creating a chatbot that emulates a specific politician and is knowledgeable about a key policy issue, we aim to demonstrate how AI could be used to promote civic engagement and democratic participation.

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  1. Chatbot worked well, good answers - can see something like this being useful

  2. I am intrigued. I didn’t expect to see disenfranchisement as a threat here before but agree it is in general (not exactly from AI, however). This will also be useful in keeping representatives accountable. Bottleneck will be the data collection and security to avoid interference/ensure verification to get politicians on board.

  3. Really interesting idea and worth exploring more. It seems very plausible that AI simulacra of politicians will be deployed. Therefore, understanding how these systems would affect democratic processes and citizen’s attitudes seems really worthwhile. A useful addition would be to go into more detail on how such systems might itself come under adversarial attack and what the implications of that could be.

  4. An impressive demo! The bot seemed knowledgeable and steerable, and I expect we will see real systems like this deployed soon. However, I think the question of how a system like this could be used in the real world and impact the democratic process deserves more exploration, with potential usecases and impacts (in whichever direction) remaining vague.

Cite this project

@misc{abecassis2024ai,
  title = {{AI Politician}},
  author = {David Abecassis and Felix Michalak and Nguyen Dang Nhat Anh and Zhiyi Xu},
  year = {2024},
  month = may,
  note = {Submitted to AI and Democracy Hackathon: Demonstrating the Risks, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/ai-politician}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/ai-politician}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026