AI bots, like ChatGPT, are quickly becoming an important part of politics, and their use has many implications. AI bots can write speeches and help draft laws, similar to what US Congresswoman Nancy Mace and local US politician Barry Finegold have done. As politicians take to the new technology, experts have raised the difficult question of whether AI bots like ChatGPT can be trained to represent a political point of view.
The use of AI bots has already caused some controversy due to its alleged liberal bias. OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT, encountered backlash when the bot apparently refused to write a poem praising then-President Donald Trump, but quickly agreed to compose couplets for President Joe Biden. Some have responded to this by creating new AI bots, such as RightWingGPT, that lean more towards the right-wing perspective or the Left’s ‘Marxist AI’.
David Karpf of George Washington University discussed the issue of AI bots representing political positions during a recent online panel, emphasising that AI bots can create cliches rather than adding any original content. Ann Meuwese from Leiden University in the Netherlands also commented after running her own experiment that using ChatGPT may not be the best choice due to its environmental impact and ethical issues.
OpenAI is a research laboratory based in San Francisco, that focuses on solving problems surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was founded in December 2015 by a team of scientists and innovators, including the world-renowned scientist and entrepreneur Elon Musk. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AI advances are driven by safely friend to humanity, and its tools are designed to help researchers, businesses, and policy makers make use of AI for beneficial goals. ChatGPT is a generative AI system open sourced by OpenAI, capable of completing tasks such as language modeling, summarizing, translating, and question-answering. Its uses have extended to many industries, including politics, where it has proven to be a useful tool for politicians.
