Candidates campaign for AI attention

In a world where artificial intelligence is moving deeper into public spaces of democracy, campaigns are learning that they also have to think about what voters' chatbots are saying.

Jordan Haines, chief technology officer at Run for Something, a liberal-leaning organization that encourages people to try their hand at seeking office, said candidates have the power to shape what the AI chatbots say about them.

“I’d say an immense amount of control, more control than they realize,” Haines said.

He leads a team that built a system called CampSight that helps candidates track what the large language model chatbots are saying about them. In some cases, the answer is very little.

“When voters were asking, ‘What is this race? What does this position do?’ often the LLMs were just not sure and saying it wasn’t a real office,” Haines said.

For instance, Haines worked with a candidate in the Denver area who ran this year for what ballots labeled the Regional Transit District Board of Directors. The CampSight system found that when people inquired, the chatbots seemed baffled. Among solutions: the Colorado candidate clued in the AI by posting his profile on the respected election information website Ballotpedia.

“He went so far as to get Ballotpedia profiles for himself and his opponents, just so that Ballotpedia would list his race,” Haines said.

In other words, the candidate went to his opponents in the race and said, in effect: We all have to put some stuff on Ballotpedia, otherwise the AI chatbot doesn’t know it’s a race.

“Yeah, the LLMs don’t know it’s a race. They don’t know what our office does, and it’s important that voters know, because they’re going to ask before they go into the voting booth,” Haines said. “And they want to make sure that they were listed.”

Candidates are increasingly asking how to polish what AI says about them, according to Tim Chambers, co-founder of Dewey Digital, part of the political communications consultancy Dewey Square.

“Help us understand where we are in AI. Help us upgrade our websites. Help us do whatever we have to do to be better communicating to the AI,” Chambers said.

He added that candidates need to show up on places like Wikipedia, Reddit, and a massive data repository called Common Crawl that chatbots like to feast upon.

It’s annoying if the AI draws a blank. It’s worse when chatbots decide to fill in the blank with nonsense. There’s a documented case out of Scotland where a chatbot fell into a hallucination and offered up a non-existent candidate. In the same election, the AI spit out the wrong legislative district when given a voter’s address.

That said, researchers are now finding chatbots are remarkably persuasive ahead of elections.

“We found that a conversation of just maybe six minutes on average with a large language model changed people’s minds meaningfully about who to vote for,” said David Rand, a professor of information science and marketing at Cornell University.

Rand is part of a team that built a special chatbot with one goal: Some months before the 2024 election, could it change Kamala Harris people into Donald Trump people, and vice versa? For some test subjects, it actually worked.

The “effects were maybe three to four times bigger than what you’d get from watching a standard political ad,” Rand said.

Why are chatbots so good at this compared to ads or haranguing your uncle at a family dinner?

“The models can come up with really large amounts of information and explain it very clearly,” Rand said.

And if you ask the AI to list sources, it will — just remember to check the links and make sure the answer is actually answering your question. When I was doing tests, I asked ChatGPT about a campaign financing measure on the California ballot next month, but ChatGPT instead disgorged a bunch of irrelevant info about an old bond measure that also had been called Proposition 4.

A survey this summer found that 87% of campaigns and strategists are using artificial intelligence in their work. But in a country with growing bipartisan concern about AI hogging resources, campaigns are using it more and talking about it less.

Additional production support by David Shin and Sophie Bellwoar.