A just-released artificial intelligence bot version of Phillips offers a similar answer: “While I respect President Biden, the data and conversations with Americans across the country indicates a strong desire for change.”
A new super PAC backed by Silicon Valley insiders is mobilizing to spread Phillips’s ideas in an unusual way. This week, they launched Dean.Bot after weighing the implications of using a sophisticated AI tool that can chat like a real person — one of the first known uses of artificial intelligence in a political campaign.
The techies behind the bot are getting help from activist hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who has described the fight as protecting Democrats from nominating a candidate who can’t win. The PAC has already raised $4 million to target New Hampshire voters with short confessional-style videos — targeted social media ads featuring Phillips and supporters making his case.
Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, formed the group We Deserve Better in early December after they saw Biden’s increasingly low poll numbers. The men — who, along with many of their donors, are political novices — decided to jump into presidential politics because they felt like Biden “was slowing down very noticeably” over the last year, a concern they say is broadly felt in the tech world, Krisiloff said. (Biden has released medical information from his doctor saying he is fit to serve.)
The PAC’s efforts, though unlikely to move the needle for a challenger who has gained very little traction despite Biden’s unpopularity, reflect enduring discontent among Democrats, including wealthy donors, with the president’s candidacy and suggest that a new class of Silicon Valley donors on the left may be among the few willing to act on that sentiment. They also show how new and risky technologies are starting to creep into the 2024 presidential election.
Experts say interactive audio like the one Krisiloff and Somers created for Phillips can potentially present the greatest risks to elections, even as the Dean.Bot acknowledges that it’s AI when asked.
“I see this as a Pandora’s box problem,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. Barrett said he believed a disclaimer was not enough to safeguard against the abuse of such technologies. “Once we have AI versions of candidates chatting up voters, it’s a short step to bots used by political opponents to fool voters into thinking that politicians are saying things they never said. And soon, everyone gets so cynical about all of this fake communication that no one believes anything anyone is saying.”
OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, a conversational AI software that initially helped powered Dean.Bot, bans the use of its artificial intelligence tools in political campaigns. The company also bans the use of its services to impersonate people without their consent.
After The Washington Post asked We Deserve Better about the policy, the group said that it had requested the service provider that it contracted to build the bot, a start-up called Delphi, remove ChatGPT from Dean.Bot, and rely instead on other open-source models that had gone into making the tool — and that Delphi had agreed to do so. OpenAI said it was looking into the issue.
To fund their group,…
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