Between now and the 2024 presidential election, AI is going to make the political cycle all the more unpleasant. You’ve probably heard about the AI misinformation problem, but the technology presents another issue for voters that’s far more surreal. Over the next year, politicians will flood the world with robot duplicates of themselves, delivering messages they’ve never actually said, in languages they don’t speak, and in ways we’ve only imagined in our most boring dystopian nightmares. Welcome to the age of the AI politician. It’s already getting started.
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. If AI audio isn’t enough for you, Adams also rolled out a new chatbot that’s meant to answer basic questions about the city’s services for small businesses. The website warns its robot “May occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content,” and doesn’t know anything about the world outside of NYC Business topics.
Some advocates accused the mayor of attempting to trick voters into thinking he speaks their language. But at an event announcing New York’s new AI action plan, Adams addressed concerns with a contempt that’s become his trademark: “We know the term AI can cause anxiety,” Adams said. “Take a deep breath. Get a grip.”
Robots are cropping up on the political scene overseas as well. In India, an AI-generated video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi singing a popular Bollywood song racked up over 3.5 million views on Instagram in advance of upcoming elections. Similar videos of Modi singing songs in South Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada are going viral across the internet, though the politician only speaks Gujarati and Hindi.
A political campaign is an effort to reach as many people as possible before voters head to the ballot box; the more personalized, the better. Candidates are often limited to shaking hands at local diners and sending out armies of volunteers to knock on doors. Now, through the wonders of AI, there’s a new opportunity for millions of simultaneous one-on-one interactions, with content tailored to each individual voter.
In certain corners of the digital advertising business, marketers are building new tools that will take targeted ads to an unprecedented extreme. Advertisers will soon pair AI with all the personal data floating around the internet to generate countless different versions of the same ad and deliver special marketing copy just for you. Imagine advertisements for cars that casually mention your name, or swap out mentions of cargo space for discussions about all-wheel drive. Political campaigns are an obvious extension of that technology.
A rudimentary version of this strategy is already underway in India, where at least one campaign is harnessing AI for upcoming assembly elections in Rajasthan. The plan is to use AI to send campaign personalized audio messages in the candidate’s voice on WhatsApp. “Once you call an [on-the-ground political worker] by his name, then he knows that ‘[the politician] knows me’ — he will be like a devotee forever, doesn’t need anything else,” Divyendra Singh Jadoun, who heads up the company working on the tech, told Rest of World.
So far, America’s 2024 presidential campaigns have only used AI for attack ads. Ron Desantis, for example, ran an ad featuring AI-generated images of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci in June. But with the first election of the Republican Primary just a few months away, it’s only a matter of time before politicians turn the AI lens on themselves. The real question, then, is who will be the first presidential candidate to launch an AI chatbot?
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