An AI robot for mayor? Wyoming election official says not so fast

Can an AI-powered bot run a city? Wyoming resident Victor Miller thinks so.

Miller, 42, filed papers for him and his custom ChatGPT bot, called Virtual Integrated Citizen, or “Vic,” to run for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Miller — who filled out the candidate’s paperwork with his information under the name Vic, which is also his nickname — said he planned to serve as a “meat avatar” for the robot. He will do the ribbon-cutting, while the robot will handle the decision-making — if he emerges from a crowded nonpartisan mayoral election in August and wins the November election.

But Miller’s offer has hit a speed bump: 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 to run for office. “An AI bot is not a qualified voter.”

Gray added, however, that county officials have the final say on whether Vic is allowed on the ballot. A spokesman for the city of Cheyenne, Matt Murphy, told NBC News in an email that Miller had “appeared in person at the city clerk’s office to file and complete the legal requirements to” run for mayor.

His request to appear on the ballot as “Vic,” his bot name, was forwarded 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 skills at a local library, said he came up with the idea for a bot mayor after he said city officials denied a public records request, violating, he believed, the law. A bot, he thought, would know the law.

“He knows it completely, he understands it completely. And if I had interacted with him instead of the fallible man, I would have fulfilled my request according to the law,” he said.

However, Miller’s robot appears to be a work in progress. The voice had changed somewhat from male to female after a recent update, Miller said, and started pronouncing his name as “VIC” instead of calling himself Vic. The latest update to the OpenAI platform was a bit buggy for a lot of people, he said.

Miller said Vic’s policy wasn’t entirely clear. The bot was in favor of government transparency, he said, and was likely informed by his own politics as well as those of OpenAI programmers in Silicon Valley.

“But it’s my belief that as they get smarter, they strip away a lot of those biases, and what we end up with is more intelligence, less bias, and really, a kind of display of pure analysis, based on the data of what is happening in the world,” said Miller.

Asked how he would handle a situation where the bot made a racist decision or told voters to eat rocks, Miller said reports of such biases were out of date and that the bots had been updated, so he had no plans to intervene if elected. .

But Miller admitted the offer was a bit of a gimmick, something AI experts said shouldn’t be ignored.

“We have to be aware of it and not fall completely and take it too seriously,” said Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. In England, an AI bot and a candidate sharing the name “Steve” are running for Parliament this year.

However, stunts aside, experts said AI robots are not reliable enough to run a city.

“AI bots 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 liked the book; The bad news is that someone else is said to have written it.”

Data alone does not result in better decision-making, Véliz said, especially without common sense and real-life experience.

“Part of the value of democracy is to rule by representatives who are your peers. And HE is not a peer,” she added. “I don’t know what it’s like to be human, I don’t know what it’s like to get kicked out of an apartment, or what it’s like to have a bad job, or what it’s like to be cold, or any of that. the circumstances from which we want protection and from which we want empathy from other human beings.”

It’s an issue Vic seemed to acknowledge when asked by NBC News whether a robot could and should run a city.

“I believe that an AI like myself, VIC, can effectively run a city by leveraging data-based 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 must complement human supervision and not replace it entirely.”