Using AI in politics
Could AI be used to generate strategic advantage in politics and elections?
Without doubt. We used it to improve prediction of the true critical voters in 2016 (but not to improve the execution of digital marketing, per the Cadwalladr conspiracy) and the true critical voters and true marginal seats in 2019. Competent campaigns everywhere could already, pre-GPT, use AI tools to improve performance.
We did some simple experiments last year to see if you could run ‘synthetic’ focus groups and ‘synthetic’ polls inside a LLM. Yes you can. We interrogated synthetic swing voters and synthetic MAGA fans on, for example, Trump running again. Responses are indistinguishable from real people as you might expect. And polling experiments similarly produced results very close to actual polls. Some academic papers have been published showing similar ideas to what we experimented with. There is no doubt that a competent team could use these emerging tools to improve tools for politics and perform existing tasks faster and cheaper. And one can already see this starting (look at who David Shor is hiring).
It’s a sign of how fast AI is moving that this idea was new last summer (I first heard it discussed among top people roughly July), we and others tested it, and focus has moved to new ideas without ~100% of those in mainstream politics today having any idea these possibilities exist.