Chatbots Can Debate For Politicians Now

Incumbent Virginia Representative Don Beyer turned down a chance to debate challengers Bentley Hensel and David Kennedy… so Hensel created a chatbot of Beyer to take his place.

The Big Argument: AI is starting to infuse into every aspect of American life. But the fact that a Congressional debate was allowed to move forward with an unauthorized chatbot of one of the candidates makes it seem like its normalization into the mainstream is already complete.

Between The Lines: Independent candidate Bentley Hensel, a software engineer by trade, refused to let Beyer miss last Thursday’s debate over Zoom. So, he created “DonBot.”

• He was originally building it on the OpenAI GPT-4o system, but the company suspended him when news broke of what he was doing. So, he switched over to Meta’s Llama 2-8b system.
• He trained DonBot solely on Beyer’s official websites, press releases, and Federal Election Commission data.
• And that was apparently all it needed for the debate — despite a few technical glitches, it performed well and answered questions cogently and on-message for Beyer. However, it didn’t sound like Beyer.

The Future: By all accounts, the debate was smooth and civic. At times, they even agreed (you can see for yourself here). According to Fast Company, Beyer will likely win the election (his sixth term) in a landslide, so that’s why he didn’t bother to show up. So, the real winner is clearly Hensel… at least as far as his software engineering career is concerned. He’s currently working on making chatbots of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for their campaigns (they’re both unauthorized). 

Don’t be surprised if there’s a future where a candidate simply sends over their chatbot to rallies or town halls… leaving them vulnerable to be hacked.

Go Deeper: South Korea’s president won his election by flooding the zone with deepfakes of himself.