ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot created by OpenAI, a US company, has rapidly gained attention in the world of politics in recent times. The AI can quickly score points in conversations, as witnessed when Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida unexpectedly came across some questions about healthcare reform from an opposition MP that were generated by the bot. When the Prime Minister issued a more specific response than the one offered by ChatGPT, the opposition MP countered that ChatGPT’s answers were “more sincere”. French trade union leader Sophie Binet was another relatively early adopter, noting that President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech “could have been done by ChatGPT”.
ChatGPT has further been employed to write speeches and draft laws. According to David Karpf of George Washington University, in the US, AI is “most often utilized to create cliches” and “has significant implications in politics”. In the United States, Congresswoman Nancy Mace gave a five-minute speech on the potential of AI, in which every single word was generated by the chatbot. Local US politician Barry Finegold also used ChatGPT to generate text for a bill meant to regulate output from AI and chatbots in Massachusetts. Anne Meuwese of Leiden University in the Netherlands also tried out ChatGPT to generate legal texts and reflected that “the added value also seems limited for now”.
Outside the world of academia and politics, the practical applications are also being considered. David Karpf from George Washington University believes that the chatbot could be “useful for generating emails asking for donations” in the context of political campaigns. The debate becomes a little more heated when it comes to the potential biases imbibed in AI – ChatGPT was supposed to have had a liberal bias when it came to poetry composition. In response to this, Elon Musk swore to release a “TruthGPT”, an AI chatbot stripped of bias. Meanwhile, David Rozado of New Zealand created a RightWingGPT to represent the conservative perspective.
OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, is at the center of much of this conversation, as they wrestle with the ethical implications of mass-deploying a tool that can fabricate “facts”. They are currently sailing in unchartered waters, making it difficult to predict how ChatGPT and similar AI tools can be most effectively used in politics, and to what extent. A good course of action for now could be to be cautious and deliberate so as to not cause any potential damages.
