LONDON – (AP) – British voters face a tight field of 13 candidates in an upcoming special election for a seat in Parliament. One, independent Andrew Gray, used artificial intelligence to make campaign promises that he says reflect what residents want.
Gray, who says he has no policies of his own, tapped into voters’ sentiments and used machine learning to craft his policy manifesto. He says the technology is a faster and fairer way for politicians to broadly reflect the views of the people they represent.
“We can engage with our constituents in a whole new way,” Gray said. “The role of the representative does not necessarily change. It just means we know what’s going on a lot quicker and can represent them more fairly.”
The abrupt resignation of Tory lawmaker Nigel Adams triggered Thursday’s parliamentary by-election in Selby and Ainsty, a mixed urban-rural constituency in northern England. It is expected to be a closely contested battle between the ruling Conservatives, the opposition Labor Party and the upstart Liberal Democrats. A number of smaller, pro-independence parties are also present.
Gray’s policies, developed using Pol.is software, include a call for higher taxes, a radical overhaul of the state-funded National Health Service and closer ties with the European Union, than Britain left three and a half years ago.
Pol.is, developed by a group in Seattle a decade ago, has been used mostly in Taiwan to find political solutions to stale problems.
Gray says Pol.is “isn’t ChatGPT,” one of the new generative AI systems which has dazzled users with the ability to produce text, images and videos imitating human labor. “It’s a little more sophisticated polling than what’s already going on.”
“AI is not so smart that it can spit out exactly what the policies are,” he says, and it still needs “human moderation and … analysis of what would be a sensible policy position.”
Gray uses Pol.is to consult residents on local issues through its website. People can comment on a topic, such as internet speed. Other users can click “agree”, “disagree” or “approve/not sure”. They cannot reply directly, but they can post their own comments.
As the conversation unfolds, Pol.is uses real-time machine learning to cluster statements, mapping them to show where there are gaps between viewpoints and areas of agreement, which can ideally foster consensus .
With the election expected to be hotly contested between the UK’s main parties, Gray is realistic about his chances. But if elected, Gray plans to use the technology to take the temperature of his district “weekly.” If you lose, you will share the data with whoever wins.
More than 7,500 votes have been cast on Gray’s platform, although he acknowledges the actual number of voters is likely much lower because each voter typically votes “dozens of times” on multiple statements.
Keegan McBride, an expert on digital transformation and governance at the Oxford Internet Institute who has worked with Pol.is, said the technology is useful for building consensus, but works best when more users participate.
Pol.is could still work with 100 to 200 users, but that raises the question of whether it’s sustainable, McBride said.
“Do you really want your entire platform to be decided by 100 or 200 people?” he said
Gray is presenting himself as the first candidate in the UK and possibly the world to use AI to reflect voters’ views, but McBride points to parties across Europe that have used digital platforms to bring democracy to the masses, with results contradictory
“You see a lot of this techno-utopian kind of vision of democracy,” McBride said. But “democracy is not going to be fixed with a new technology or a new digital system or artificial intelligence or anything like that, because it’s not. a technological problem. It’s a sociological problem.”
“And it’s much more complex than just using a new tool,” he added.
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