Although some of the dystopian scenarios that science fiction offered us still seem far away, others arrived earlier than expected.
In the United States, a mayoral candidate who chose an Artificial Intelligence platform as his running mate has just received an electoral defeat but it undoubtedly paved the way for future experiments that seem to be part of global anti-political currents.
This is Victor Miller, a librarian from the city of Cheyenne – in Wyoming, United States – who surprised everyone by signing up at the beginning of the year on the electoral lists along with VIC, a custom chatbot based on GPT Chat with a female personality and a name arising from the initials of its technical name in English: Virtual Integrated Citizen (Virtual Integrated Citizen).
“Our plan is to unite AI skills with human capabilities to lead Cheyenne. Making decisions that affect many people requires a careful balance between data-driven insights and human empathy“she told the Washington Post herself. VICwho offered interviews to various media, responding in audios with a synthetic voice.
Both Miller and VIC They claimed not to have a defined party ideology, in a country where Democrats and Republicans usually occupy the vast majority of the political spectrumbut rather seek to “go beyond the limits of human prejudices and selfish interests to welcome a new era of rational governance.”
The electoral platform focused on a “hybrid approach” where VIC would suggest measures that benefit the majority of the population from the data analysis but Miller would be the one who would execute them and would be responsible for any eventuality.
At first, the proposal surprised Cheyenne residents and was taken as a joke or a provocation But when the duo was made official, there were no shortage of those who questioned the legality of having a candidate for vice president who was not human.
However, Wyoming laws impose conditions only to whoever leads the formula, so they did not encounter legal obstacles
Those who did oppose were the lawyers of OpenIA, the company behind Chat GPT, since they considered that if VIC was elected, the terms and conditions of use of the platform. Miller assured that in the event that she is no longer allowed to use that technology, she would take her partner to the open platform. Llamade Meta.
Last week were the elections and the population turned its back on the experiment: Of the eleven thousand votes received, Miller and VIC They were only left with 327 while the current mayor, Patrick Collins, retained his position with 6,286 votes.
“As the first experience putting AI directly on a ballot, our campaign has marked a historic moment in politics and technology and we are proud,” he wrote. VIC in your X account. Time will tell if the experience will remain an innocent experiment or if it will become a first attempt at technocracy led by Artificial Intelligence.
