#49: AI and Politics

Ian Bowie
Hello and welcome to AI Unfiltered with me, Ian Bowie, and our resident expert, Michael Stormbom, where we will be talking about everything to do with AI in our modern digital society and what the future holds for all of us.

Ian Bowie
So, I mean, what do you reckon? Does AI have a useful role to play in politics?

Michael Stormbom
As an AI language model, I can’t…

Ian Bowie
Indeed. You see, that’s it, isn’t it? Yeah. So again, as a politician, I have no particular opinion either way.

Michael Stormbom
Although there are different breeds of politicans. There are the demagogues Yes. I suppose the, let’s say the modern era of, let’s call it analytics and politics was when Barack Obama ran for president the first time. So that was in a way a revolution in how campaigns are conducted. So I mean, they did what is called microtargeting, really honing down on people who would vote for you. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that was of course then followed by what happened in 2016., where it was not just about….

Ian Bowie
Don’t remind me. Cambridge analytics. Yes, we can see what about an AI… imagine, right? You take every single speech that is in the public domain that has ever been made by anybody especially all the interesting and intelligent people in the world. Right. And then you get it to start generating speeches.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, you know there was actually this politician in my neck of the woods, Åland. So they gave a speech that ChatGPT had written. The point of that was basically as an experiment, but nevertheless.

Ian Bowie
So that they actually said that this has been generated by…

Michael Stormbom
After the fact so not while the speech was ongoing. Yeah, by the way, FYI, kind of thing.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Yeah. And how did that work out for him?

Michael Stormbom
Seeing as no one had noticed anything until January or February. Really? Yeah. So that’s kind of quite interesting,

Ian Bowie
Or it may be indicates how carefully they listened to him in the first place.

Michael Stormbom
How much attention do we actually pay to our politicians is I think an interesting question.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Yeah. You have AI language models. Do you know how much money Boris has earned? Giving sort of speeches and things since he left office? Pushed out. Yeah. And it’s not long ago. Was it? I mean, when when was the sort of, you know, given the old heave ho.

Michael Stormbom
Summer last year, right.

Ian Bowie
Somewhere around that time, then we had the interim prime minister. 42 days. the lettuce.

Michael Stormbom
We’ve had 50 prime ministers since.

Ian Bowie
Right, we’re talking about a little bit more than half a year. Basically, 5 million quid.

Michael Stormbom
Not bad.

Ian Bowie
Not bad. Is it at all? No. Blimey.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, man, I don’t know about these sort of like celebrity speeches.

Ian Bowie
No, I don’t know either. I mean, what’s he got to say?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, like why? Yeah, why would I pay 10,000? Whatever.

Ian Bowie
10,000? I think he I think he commands as much as half a million.

Michael Stormbom
What for one ticket to a…?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I mean, one that I mean, for one speech, and I mean, you might have 100 people there.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. But if I hire an audience member pay, why would I pay 10,000? No.

Ian Bowie
How much would you pay to be in there? I don’t know.

Michael Stormbom
He can pay me to listen.

Ian Bowie
So there are there about I think if you buy a ticket or something like that, you probably easily pay 1500 pounds or a 1000, maybe

Michael Stormbom
If it was like the resurrected Led Zeppelin and featuring a resurrected Freddie Mercury. Yeah, maybe. And the guy probably gives the same speech every single time anyway.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I can imagine a little bit tailors it, just has to remember which town he’s in.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. Good evening, Birmingham.

Ian Bowie
And I do mean Birmingham, Alabama.

Michael Stormbom
Big Boris Johnson fans, I’m sure.

Ian Bowie
But really, I mean, I’m only guessing I don’t know if he gets half a million. But he gets huge amounts of money for giving these speeches. I imagine. I mean, if you took all the most interesting speeches, you took speeches by all the past presidents who’ve ever been recorded, British Prime Ministers,Finnish ministes, you know whatever, put it all in there and then got AI to start… and all business leaders you know, you get all you know, the top sort of business people from around the world, the most successful ones investors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You could actually create some very interesting and possibly even very useful speeches. Couldn’t you.

Michael Stormbom
It could. I also think it could turn out to be a very incoherent speech like a mishmash of different…

Ian Bowie
Maybe you take genres so you take politics, you take business. And then even within business, you take things like, you know, investing innovation, creatiity, and then you take the top minds, the top thinkers. And you put all of that into…

Michael Stormbom
Maybe you could use AI to like, hone your elevator pitch, kind of thing, why not?

Ian Bowie
So in actual fact, going back to the idea that this is all supposed to be about AI and politics. I mean, so I would imagine there’s probably quite a lot of that going on now. That AI algorithms are being used in order to at least give the framework for speeches, that politicians can then you know, put the meat onto or or their speech writers can put the meat on to and that they can get and get go off and deliver, you know, it’s that old tell people what they want to hear, innit really.

Michael Stormbom
Not to go off on a on a tangent,but I think also this sort of new… the social media politicians, the new breed of politicians, so I mean, of course our current Prime Minister, I mean, she’s…

Ian Bowie
She’s a real social media maven, isn’t she, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, more power to her otherwise, but I’m saying she’s a very sort of like polished politician in that sense, has a very controlled image in social media.

Ian Bowie
Social media hasn’t always been controlled. There was a few little blips weren’t there?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, there were but even there, there was such a huge backlash because, people were like, what the fuck media? I think.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, actually, I think she did the right thing. She kind of just ignored it. And she really she didn’t take any notice. Didn’t let it get her down just okay.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, no, I mean, a woman in her 30s went to a party. What was the fucking story here really, but anyway, no but this sort of like very polished politicians and also, in a way insulating themselves from media scrutiny. So I mean, it’s easier to just put out your, well, bullshit on social media. And then you don’t get called on it because you just refuse to talk to the media. Then you control what information you disseminate and how you disseminate and you’re never really put to scrutiny.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, true.

Michael Stormbom
No AI there necessarily, but…

Ian Bowie
No, well no, no. I don’t know. I mean, AI is prevalent in social media as well, isn’t it? So I mean, maybe there is.

Michael Stormbom
Things can go viral for example.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
And there was this interesting article about the most recent presidential election in South Korea, where there were like a virtual campaign or so their presidential candidates do they created avatars, avatars of themselves and then the avatars did the campaigns for them. So, that was kind of interesting. So the leading candidate, the person who won, they really digitized his face and his voice, and then they had this virtual candidate of him doing the campaigning partially for him. So it was kinda interesting. I mean, with his speeches, and so you could interact with the virtual campaigner. Which is handy, yes, very handy.

Ian Bowie
Actually, that’s quite interesting because you know, that actually, because in the UK, they have these kind of like drop in sessions, politicians where the constituents can go and talk to their local politician. And I’m not sure what they’ve done now, because about a year ago, a little bit over. One politician was actually murdered. Yeah, horrendous. So actually, having an avatar that can interact on your behalf wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I mean, it’s certainly a security thing for the politicians. I mean, it’s horrendous to think that they’re not safe.

Michael Stormbom
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s a threat to democracy right there.

Ian Bowie
Of course it is. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, you know, if you can get it to a stage where that really works.p

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. Then we’ll come back to the ChatGPT problem. So imagine a politician trained, and so..

Ian Bowie
In actual fact, you’d probably just be better off having a sort of an open teams meeting where you could meet meet your politician on teams and ask them questions. Virtually Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.

Michael Stormbom
For a imagine you have a you have a chatbot trained with the material of some politician and then it goes off script and…

Ian Bowie
Yeah, but politicians often go off script as well, don’t they? So I mean, what’s the difference?

Michael Stormbom
Yes, we should replace taxes with the death penalty. What?

Ian Bowie
And then they backtrack. No, I was taken out of context. I didn’t really mean that.

Michael Stormbom
That was ChatGPT, it wasn’t me. Wasn’t it Boris Johnson who famously before Brexit had written two opinion pieces, like one in favor of Brexit, and one against Brexit, and it was sort of like a toss of the coin which one to publish, basically. Yeah, so I mean, so in that sense, politicians are definitely like large language models. There are no core convictions there is just spewing of words.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah. Depending on what the AI algorithm tells them, they should be saying yes.

Ian Bowie
What would be really interesting is imagine if you created a fake candidate, who was only an avatar and let that do the campaigning. And then he won.

Ian Bowie
Who does the deciding then, is the question.

Ian Bowie
Well, the voters. Imagine if you could do it in such a way that people didn’t realize that this is an avatar only? And they started thinking it’s a real person? Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
No, but I mean, who does the job then when this non existent candidate has been elected?

Ian Bowie
Nobody, you have to go back to square one but—

Michael Stormbom
Or, you just to automate the politicians as well. So there is some sort of decider algorithm that makes all the decisions. Actually, I saw an article about. Yeah, I think was it in Denmark? It’s a party called the synthetic party. Okay, let me see if I can find the link. Yes. So this Danish political party is led by an AI, published by vice.com. So the thing is that they have an AI representative and all of their policies are derived from AI, is what they’re saying. Right. This was in the run up to the election now in November last year. They synthetic parties public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot leader Lars. Okay, which is programmed on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970. And he’s meant to represent the values of the 20% of Danes who do not vote in the election. That is a direct quote from vice.com there. So of course, the actual party chairman Lars the chatbot, but he cannot of course not run for anything because…

Ian Bowie
Because he’s a chatbot.

Michael Stormbom
But anyway, so the humans who are running so they’re committing to implementing the policies of Lars the chatbot. So that said, I don’t think they made it into the parliament.

Ian Bowie
Not at all.

Michael Stormbom
No, no, I don’t think so.

Ian Bowie
So they lost their deposit.

Michael Stormbom
Let’s see what policies they have here. So they’re proposing to establish universal basic income, all right. Of $13,000 per month. Okay, that’s interesting. Aha, okay. jointly owned internet. And IT sector in the government. Okay. Interesting. So universal basic income.

Ian Bowie
$13,000 a month. Yeah. But I mean, basically, that’s just an AI version of the Pirate Party, isn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
It is and basically, if I understand that correctly, then they’ve just taken policies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You could easily do that with any party.

Ian Bowie
Well, I was about to say, I mean, they’re honest about it. And they’re saying, Look, you know, Lars the chatbot is our leader. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. You know, but I mean, I’m sure that the mainstream political parties are harnessing the power of AI to help forge their own policies as well, aren’t they? And their own manifestos? Of course they are. They won’t admit it. Because that’s kind of scary, innit, to think that.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, I would think that if you would use analytics to help you hone your platform. Yeah. I mean, not just in a get more votes kind of way.

Ian Bowie
Analytics has got a bad name nowadays, because everything in the UK at least is linked to Cambridge Analytics, you know, which is highly manipulative. You know, this is, you know, you got to ask the question, is this really the way that we want to formulate future political policies, and manifestos.

Michael Stormbom
As an AI language model, I….

Ian Bowie
That’s right, but you see, is there a potential to run an economy using AI as the basis that you would take all the economic data, historical data from everywhere in the world, and put it into this massive algorithm, and then press create me the perfect economy. Based on these parameters.

Michael Stormbom
Somebody had trained an algorithm to figure out what the optimal tax policy would be. So optimizing in terms of optimizing equality, and optimizing, or finding a balance between equality and productivity. So using AI to figuring out what the optimal tax policy would be given certain so they had done that.

Ian Bowie
And the result was.

Michael Stormbom
Well the results was in their experiment was that this particular tax policy that it had come up with was well based on those parameters, productivity and equality, it was better than what’s currently being implemented anywhere. But the basic idea of the study was that using modeling rather than human intuition, you can create a better tax system than what is currently in place. And of course, of course, you have to decide what you are optimizing for. I mean, if you optimize for, for example, just productivity, that’s not necessarily going to be beneficial to equality, for example, and so forth, so finding the balance between between different variables. Of course, well, that’s just one aspect of economic policy, but by about exactly that, using AI and analytics, yeah. And if it’s a bad word…

Ian Bowie
But if you think about the company…

Michael Stormbom
No what I’m into in terms of forming policy, yeah, like, why not use data to inform…

Ian Bowie
How do you know that the analytics that you’re being fed, are genuine? I mean, imagine if you get an analytics company who is highly right wing, and the Labour Party then hire them. Yeah. And they feed them all this stuff. They’re just manipulating the Labour Party manifesto, aren’t they? For their own ends?

Michael Stormbom
So what you’re saying is that politicians should form policy based on the courage of their convictions, is that what you’re sayin?

Ian Bowie
It’s never gonna happen, is it. It’s just not gonna happen. Yeah, courage and politicians are oxymorons, aren’t they? They are not good bedfellows.

Michael Stormbom
No. No, I don’t know how I would want to have a little more…

Ian Bowie
To be a good politician, first, remove backbone. Yes.

Michael Stormbom
Yes. Install AI chatbot. Yes. But not by being pragmatic in that sense. I mean, for example, looking at demographic analysis of what should be built where, that sort of stuff like having that sort of things inform policy.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, but they are if they have that kind of stuff. Why doesn’t it get done?

Michael Stormbom
Well, that is the question. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Well, there you go. You know, it’s alright. So in an ideal world, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a corrupted world.

Michael Stormbom
That’s why we need the metaverse again so we can have the.

Ian Bowie
Well, yeah, we can start again.

Michael Stormbom
Democratic utopia in there with.

Ian Bowie
Yes. Yeah. But I don’t think we can ever win, can we It doesn’t matter what kind of technologies we introduce, how much analytics we have and and how much data nothing is ever really going to change?

Michael Stormbom
No, I mean, if you don’t do anything sensible with the data, then no, of course not.

Ian Bowie
No, because it doesn’t matter what the data says. It all comes back to one thing, all right. If we do this, we’re going to make money from it.

Michael Stormbom
That is very true.

Ian Bowie
No, you’re going to take people off the streets. Now. We don’t do that. There’s no money in that.

Ian Bowie
I’ve been reading quite a lot about environmental things recently. And we’re screwed basically. Sad to say. The future does not look bright.

Michael Stormbom
This podcast is broadcast from the doomsday bunker.

Ian Bowie
But no, I mean, I assume that they are using AI to try and predict..

Michael Stormbom
Well they’re trying to model the those things. That’s where all the predictions of catastrophe is coming from, because that’s yeah, that’s the trajectory that’s been modeled, yeah.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I don’t know ChatGPT will help us with that one, but.

Ian Bowie
Well it won’t, will it,, but if it survives…

Michael Stormbom
ChatGPT will tell… tell our stories.

Ian Bowie
Maybe we should go to The Simpsons. Apparently the Simpsons have been very good at predicting things. Somebody was saying the other day that the Simpsons predicted the rise of Trump, approximately 15 years before he became president.

Michael Stormbom
There was a throwaway joke in one of the early episodes there, president Trump, yes indeed.

Ian Bowie
Yes, indeed. Yeah. So there you go.

Michael Stormbom
So let’s look at the episode from today and see what’s going to happen down the line. Yes, yeah. Although at this point, I think, you know, I haven’t really watched him since in many, many years.

Ian Bowie
Neither have I.

Michael Stormbom
I’m sure we can have ChatGPT write a Simpsons episode.

Ian Bowie
I’m not sure if the’yre…

Michael Stormbom
Oh, yeah, it was just renewed for season 5000 or whatever.

Ian Bowie
Okay. So they’re still creating it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s quite funny.

Michael Stormbom
Or it was at least, I don’t know how it is nowadays.

Ian Bowie
Oh, I’m sure it’s as good as it was back in the day.

Michael Stormbom
I think the critics might differ on that one. I don’t know.

Ian Bowie
Because I haven’t watched, you know, for years, the Simpsons.

Michael Stormbom
But here’s an interesting question for the Green parties of Europe and beyond.

Ian Bowie
Here we go.

Michael Stormbom
The environmental impact of these large language models and AI?

Ian Bowie
Absolutely. But are they behind them?

Michael Stormbom
No, but I would think the general idea of using technology to help us alleviate or mitigate the impact of climate change. I would think that would be….

Ian Bowie
A contradiction in terms. Isn’t it really.

Michael Stormbom
It is, as it stands.

Ian Bowie
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
So we’ve got you Green parties! Except I have no idea if that’s the… Yeah, I mean, again, AI to help solve the environmental problems, not so much, they’re causing more of them.

Ian Bowie
No, of course. Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, every every time I type something into ChatGPT a tree dies.

Ian Bowie
Probably more. Yeah. Three and a half. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, think about the ruddy data farms that they need to drive this thing. Oh, yes. There you go. We’ve come full circle. What’s the point? On that happy note, people.

Michael Stormbom
I think that might be enough for episode 49.

Ian Bowie
You think?

Ian Bowie
You’ve been listening to me Ian Bowie and my colleague Michael Stormbom, on AI Unfiltered and for more episodes, please go to aiunfiltered.com. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai