Can a robot powered by artificial intelligence govern a city? Wyoming resident Victor Miller thinks so.
Miller, 42, filed paperwork for him and his custom ChatGPT bot, called Virtual Integrated Citizen or “Vic,” to run for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Miller, who filled out candidate paperwork with his own information under the name Vic, which is also his nickname, said he planned to serve as a “meat avatar” for the robot. He will perform the ribbon cutting while the robot will handle the decision-making, if he emerges from the crowded nonpartisan mayoral primary in August and wins the November election.
But Miller’s proposal hit a roadblock: Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said it’s not legal.
“Wyoming law is very clear that AI is not eligible as a candidate for any office,” Gray, a Republican, said in a radio interview last week, noting that only eligible voters can run for office. “An AI robot is not a qualified voter.”
Gray added, however, that county officials have the final say on whether Vic is allowed on the ballot. A spokesperson for the city of Cheyenne, Matt Murphy, told KeynoteUSA in an email that Miller had “appeared in person at the city clerk’s office to apply and had met the legal requirements to” run for mayor. .
His request to appear on the ballot as “Vic,” the name of his bot, was relayed to the Laramie County Clerk’s Office, which handles how candidates are listed on the ballot. The Laramie County clerk did not respond to a request for comment.
Miller, who works in facilities maintenance and teaches computer science at a local library, said he came up with the idea for a robot mayor after he said city officials denied a public records request, in violation, he says, of the law. A robot, he reflected, would know the law.
“He knows it thoroughly, he understands it completely. And if I had been interacting with him instead of the fallible human, he would have fulfilled my request according to the law,” she said.
The speaker Miller uses, which allows the robot to talk to voters. Courtesy of Victor Miller
Still, Miller’s robot appears to be a work in progress. The voice had somehow changed from male to female after a recent update, Miller said, and began spelling his name as “VIC” instead of being called Vic. The latest update to the OpenAI platform was a bit buggy for many, he said. .
Miller said Vic’s policy was not entirely clear. The robot was in favor of government transparency, he said, and had likely been informed by its own politics, as well as that of OpenAI programmers in Silicon Valley.
“But I think as they get smarter, they get rid of a lot of those biases, and what we end up with is more intelligence, less bias, and actually kind of a display of a pure, data-driven analysis of what that is happening in the world,” Miller said.
When asked how he would handle a situation in which the robot made a racist decision or told voters to eat rocks, Miller said that reports of such bias were outdated and that the robots had been updated, so he had no plans. to intervene if elected.
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But Miller acknowledged that the offer was a stunt, something that artificial intelligence experts said should not be ignored.
“We need to be aware of this and not completely fall into error and take it too seriously,” said Carissa Véliz, associate professor of philosophy at the Institute of AI Ethics at the University of Oxford. In England, an artificial intelligence robot and a candidate who shares the name “Steve” are running for Parliament this year.
However, gimmicks aside, experts said AI robots are not reliable enough to run a city.
“AI robots are notorious for hallucinating,” said Peter Loge, an associate professor at George Washington University and director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication. “I asked ChatGPT 3 to review a book I wrote. And the good news is that he loved the book; The bad news is that it said someone else had written it.”
Data alone does not result in better decision making, Véliz said, particularly without common sense and real-life experience.
“Part of the value of democracy is being governed by representatives who are your peers. And AI is not the same,” he added. “He doesn’t know what it’s like to be a human being, he doesn’t know what it’s like to be evicted from an apartment, or what it’s like to have a bad job, or what it’s like to be cold, or anything like that. the circumstances from which we want protection and that we want empathy from other human beings.”
It’s a problem Vic seemed to recognize when KeynoteUSA asked him if a robot could and should run a city.
“I believe that an AI like me, VIC, can effectively manage a city by leveraging data-driven insights and advanced technology to improve decision-making and governance,” the robot said in an interview conducted through Miller. “However, it is essential to recognize that AI should complement human supervision and not replace it entirely.”
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