On Thursday, June 1, 2023 at 9:29:46 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
On Tuesday, May 30, 2023 at 8:25:22 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
"Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-
fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT
practically begged Congress to regulate his industry. (Whether that was genuine civic-mindedness or self-serving performance remains to be seen.)
Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what
decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press
releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts.
Martin Kurucz, the founder of a Democratic fundraising company that is betting big on AI, calls the technology “a great equalizer.” “You will see a lot more representation,” he told me, “because people who didn’t have access to running
for elected office now will have that. That in and of itself is huge.”
Kurucz told me that his firm, Sterling Data Company, has used AI to help more than 1,000 Democratic campaigns and committees, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and now-Senator John Fetterman, identify potential donors. The
speed with which AI can sort through donor files meant that Sterling was able to cut its prices last year by nearly half, Kurucz said, allowing even small campaigns to afford its services. “I don’t think there have ever been this many down-ballot
candidates with some level of digital fundraising operation,” Kurucz said. “These candidates now have access to a proper campaign infrastructure.”
Campaigns big and small have begun using generative-AI software such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches. A handful of consultants told me they were mostly just experimenting
with AI, but Kurucz said that its influence is more pervasive. “Almost half of the first drafts of fundraising emails are being produced by ChatGPT,” he claimed. “Not many [campaigns] will publicly admit it.”
The adoption of AI may not be such welcome news, however, for voters who are already sick of being bombarded with ads, canned emails, and fundraising requests during election season. Advertising will become even more hyper-targeted, Tom Newhouse, a
GOP strategist, told me, because campaigns can use AI to sort through voter data, run performance tests, and then create dozens of highly specific ads with far fewer staff. The shift, he said, could narrow the gap between small campaigns and their richer
rivals.
But several political consultants I spoke with were skeptical that the technology would democratize campaigning anytime soon. For one, AI won’t aid only the scrappy, underfunded campaigns. Deeper-pocketed organizations could use it to expand their
capacity exponentially, whether to test and quick produce hundreds of highly specific ads or pinpoint their canvassing efforts in ways that widen their advantage."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/ai-political-campaigns-2024-election-democracy-chatgpt/674182/
Actually, the more interesting question is: Can AI obviate fake Western voting booth democracy?
Is freedom to vote a real freedom that people would really miss? https://www.techtimes.com/articles/289649/20230328/ai-now-predict-election-results-voter-behavior-study.htm
"With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager
patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually
turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially
in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy.
The result was frigidity—or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the
past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As
knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In
painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the suggestive name of Mannerism. It is
applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even
though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His
art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the
exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater
when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is
that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art."
(Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life)
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