AI election assistant Ashley supports US Democrats
In Pennsylvania, the Democrats are using a new campaign aid: Ashley is an AI, speaks in 20 languages in a robotic voice and knows the candidate's platform down to the last detail. The inventors assume that citizens will receive such calls on a large scale in the future.
US Democrat Shamaine Daniels lost the 2022 congressional election to Republican and Trump supporter Scott Perry. Next year's battle for one of Pennsylvania's seats in the House of Representatives is not looking good either. But Daniels has a new election assistant: artificial intelligence (AI) Ashley, who makes thousands of calls to potential voters over the weekend. She can do this in 20 languages, all of which deliberately sound like a machine.
That's exactly what caught his attention, says 63-year-old David Fish, one of the callers. "What I really liked is that it identified itself as AI and didn't try to play me."
Election calls are generally regarded as a nuisance by the population in the USA. Put simply, normal "robocalls" involve machines automatically going through voter lists and playing a message to anyone who picks up the landline. Ashley is different: it analyzes the available data on the voters called and shapes the conversation according to their political priorities. Admittedly, good human election workers can also do this. But Ashley is tireless, knows Daniels' election program down to the smallest detail and doesn't get frustrated when callers hang up swearing.
No legal framework
"This will expand quickly," says Ilya Mouzykantskii, head of Civox, the London-based company behind Ashley. "We want to be making tens of thousands of calls a day by the end of the year and soon reach six figures." This will come "in a big way" in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, says the 30-year-old. The former computer science student from Stanford and his co-founder Adam Reis from Columbia University do not say which AI models - i.e. programs such as ChatGPT from Microsoft partner OpenAI - they are using for Ashley. However, they say there are more than 20.
It is indicative of the state of the technology that Reis was able to build the system almost single-handedly. In the past, 50 engineers would have had to work on it for years, he says. Mouzykantskii says he is aware of the risks of his creation. Hence Civox's decision to give Ashley a unique machine voice. According to Mouzykantskii, he would welcome regulation in this area: Other companies could create AIs that would be virtually indistinguishable from humans, but keep their nature secret. To date, there is virtually no legal framework in the USA.
A few states such as Michigan have regulated the use of "deepfakes" in the election campaign or intend to do so. Pennsylvania is not one of them. Consumer advocate Robert Weissman from Public Citizen sees no barriers to machines like Ashley: "I don't know of any federal law that would make it illegal."
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The use of AI election assistants like Ashley is expected to increase significantly in future elections, including the US presidential election in 2024. Civox, the company behind Ashley, aims to make tens of thousands of calls a day with it by the end of the year and reach six-figure numbers in the 2024 elections.
Source: www.ntv.de
