Victor Müller [Archival audio clip]: She asks what policies are most important to you, VIC?
VIC [Archival audio clip]: The most important policy measures for me focus on transparency, economic development and innovation.
Leah Feiger: This is so bizarre. I have to ask, could VIC be exposed to other sources of information than these public records? For example, an email from a conspiracy theorist who wants VIC to do something not so good at the polls that doesn’t represent their constituents.
Victoria Elliott: Good question. I asked Miller, “Hey, you built this bot on ChatGPT. We know that the data that goes into training these models sometimes has issues or biases. Are you concerned that VIC might inherit some of those biases or that there might be issues?” He said, “No, I trust OpenAI. I believe in their product.” You’re right. He decided, because he cares deeply about Cheyenne’s governance, to feed this bot hundreds and hundreds of pages of what he calls supporting documents. The kinds of documents that people submit at a city council meeting. Whether that’s a complaint, an email, a zoning issue, whatever. He fed that to VIC. But you’re right, these chatbots can be trained on other material. He said he actually asked VIC, “What if someone tries to spam you? What if someone tries to trick you? Sending them emails and stuff.” VIC apparently responded by saying, “I’m pretty confident that I can distinguish what is a real concern of the electorate from what is spam or what is not real.”
Leah Feiger: I guess I would just say that a third of Americans currently do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but I’m so glad that this robot is very, very confident that it can decode the misinformation and disinformation that’s being spread here.
Victoria Elliott: Total.
Leah Feiger: That was VIC in Wyoming. Tell us a bit more about AI Steve in the UK. How is it different from VIC?
Victoria Elliott: Firstly, the AI Steve is actually the candidate.
Leah Feiger: What do you actually mean by the candidate?
Victoria Elliott: He is on the ballot.
Leah Feiger: Oh, okay. There is no meat puppet?
Victoria Elliott: There is a meat puppet, Steve Endicott. He is a businessman from Brighton. He describes himself as the person who goes to Parliament and does human things.
Leah Feiger: Secure.
Victoria Elliott: But when people go to vote in the UK next month, they will actually have the opportunity to vote not for Steve Endicott, but for AI Steve.
Leah Feiger: This is unbelievable. Oh my God. How does this work?
Victoria Elliott: Steve Endicott and Jeremy Smith, the developer of AI Steve, described it to me as a big collection point for feedback from the community. In the background, people can talk to AI Steve or call him and apparently have 10,000 conversations going on at any given time. They can say, “I want to know when garbage collection is going to change,” or, “I’m upset about tax policy,” or whatever. Those conversations will be transcribed by the AI and condensed into the policy positions that voters care about. But to make sure people aren’t spamming them and trying to trick them, they’re going to use what they call validators. Brighton is about an hour outside of London, a lot of people commute between the two cities. They’ve said, “We want to ask people who commute to sign up for these emails to become validators.” They go through everything and say, “These are the policies that people say are important to AI Steve. Do you, the average commuter, find that they’re actually valuable to you?” Anything that gets more than 50% interest or approval or whatever is what the real Steve, who will be in Parliament, will vote on. They have this second layer of control to make sure that everything people say as feedback to the AI is reviewed by real people. They’re trying to make it a little bit harder for them to game the system.