Incumbent congressman not turning up to debates? Train an AI on his press releases

Hallucinations, made-up facts... and that's just the human politicians

Generative AI has reached its logical conclusion with a chatbot ready to stand in for a congressional incumbent at a debate.

Dubbed "DonBot," the chatbot is the brainchild of Bentley Hensel, a software engineer running for US Congress as an independent candidate. Bentley aims to "bring technological innovation and transparency to the federal government," but the Democratic incumbent, Don Beyer, is apparently not interested in appearing in further debates.

Hensel's solution, rather than the traditional empty chair approach, where candidates would pretend to debate the absent incumbent, is to train a generative AI on Beyer's press releases, website, and so on. The chatbot, a text-based AI running on an OpenAI API, would therefore have an "understanding" of what Beyer might say in a debate.

Hensel is all about transparency and technical innovation – hence the publicizing of DonBot. Despite transparency not being the first word that springs to mind when considering OpenAI, the code behind DonBot (or CandidateGPT) can be looked at on GitHub and is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license.

A spokesperson for the Hensel for Congress campaign told The Register that the chatbot was "designed to provide straightforward, factual responses based solely on publicly available data from Beyer's official sources."

Not at all like a real politician, judging by some recent performances.

The spokesperson continued: "While leveraging OpenAI's API as the underlying technology, Bentley has taken measures to minimize AI 'hallucinations' by grounding responses strictly in the dataset derived from Beyer's materials."

The system runs locally on Dell r730s in Bentley's home lab, uses a PostgreSQL database for a back end, and is written in Python, "though due for a refactor."

We were given access to the chatbot and, in our admittedly unscientific experimentation, found it gave very clear and factual information on Beyer's policies without resorting to made-up facts and statistics. It also gave us a lengthy spiel on DonBot's appreciation for cheese and local cheese producers when we asked: "Do you like cheese?"

Using the no inference option resulted in a terse "The provided information does not mention my personal preferences regarding cheese."

The spokesperson said: "If Beyer, or any other candidate, does not attend the debate, they will be given an opportunity to review and revise any content used to generate DonBot's responses."

Hensel told The Register: "There's a lot I still want to improve, but time is definitely limited. If all the stars align, I hope to roll out a candidate comparison feature where users can ask questions, and all the AI candidates in the race will respond.

"That's still dependent on bandwidth, but once it's done, I'd love to spin up a version for Harris vs. Trump as well."

Concerns over the use of AI technologies anywhere from social media to political discourse have reached fever pitch. Earlier this year, a political consultant was fined $6 million for bogus robocalls that used AI-generated voice cloning technology to impersonate US President Joe Biden. In April, Microsoft warned that the results of elections might be influenced by malicious actors armed with AI tools. However, Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center, added that the deception and misinformation might not be as sophisticated as feared.

Beyer did not immediately respond to The Register's questions, but even the possibility of replacing a politician with an AI does seem to hint that the rise of the machines might occur sooner than expected. Unless, of course, a hallucination results in Congress calling for sanctions on cheese rather than a foreign power. ®