Chatbot technology is making waves in the political sphere, as politicians seek out tools such as ChatGPT (released last November by U.S. firm OpenAI) to score points or write speeches. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida received first-hand experience when an opposition MP posed questions to him generated with ChatGPT, with the alternative answers claiming to be “more sincere”. French trade union boss Sophie Binet also commented on President Emmanuel Macron’s speech suggesting it “could have been done by ChatGPT” – suggesting the bot might be worth considering as a political tool.
Politicians have even gone further, attempting to use ChatGPT to draft laws. U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Mace gave a five minute Senate speech based entirely on AI questions, whilst Massachusetts politician Barry Finegold used ChatGPT to generate bill proposals. Anne Meuwese from Leiden University in the Netherlands ran a similar experiment and also found that ChatGPT could introduce unique ideas. However, she added that the full implications of AI and chatbot technology are still obscure and cautioned against a widespread uptake.
On the other hand, the bot could be extremely useful for political campaigns and reducing workloads. David Karpf of George Washington University suggested AI could be used to compose emails asking for donations, or other small tasks that don’t necessarily need to be of great quality. There has been notable controversy over ChatGPT’s bias – it happily composed a poem for President Biden, but allegedly refused a similar request for Donald Trump. This has spurred on billionaire magnate Elon Musk to suggest an alternative “right-wing bot”, and Belgium satirist Vincent Flibustier has generated a bot to act like a “angry trade unionist”.
OpenAI is at the forefront of the ChatGPT technology, leading the charge in AI-driven text-generation. They offer research tools which experts can use to explore the boundaries and possibilities of AI, such as GPT-3, an AI language processing application that is made available via the cloud. Powered by OpenAI proprietary technology, the platform allows for rapid, precise and low cost development of text-generating bots and applications. OpenAI is a research laboratory founded in 2015 and owned by a consortium of tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The Open AI mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
