AI and its role in elections

Make Me Smart September 20, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Alright, let’s just do this before I say any more random stuff.

Kai Ryssdal 

Random stuff is what this podcast is all about. Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

You’re Kai Ryssdal. And I’m Kimberly Adams.

Kai Ryssdal 

Sorry. Okay, so what happened was, all right, so first of all, forget to identify myself. Number two. At this point, do I have to on this podcast? Don’t people know who I am. But also number three, both dogs came into the shed right at that moment, and Bons just came in and like curled up on her bed, which she never does without sniffing around. And when they came in and grabbed the tennis ball from when she was here at the 6:15 meeting this morning. So there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of canine involvement. And I apologize.

Kimberly Adams 

A lot of action, a lot of action. Okay, well, great way to start. Hi, I’m Kimberly. And we appreciate everyone surviving this far into the show. Because it’s Wednesday, we are halfway through the week. And clearly, it’s like it’s weighing on us. But yeah, it’s September the 20th. And we are all going to be fine.

Kai Ryssdal 

We are we’re all gonna be fine. But that is not necessarily what the news says. Why don’t you go first, and then I’ll go second.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, so I’ve got sort of one of these shot and chaser type deals. The first one is a story I saw in Politico a couple of days ago, about a chat bot that has been developed. And it’s a little bit of a PR stunt to sort of sell yet another AI technology. But there is a chatbot from this project called Chat2024. And it has I’m reading from Politico, “soft launch a multi candidate platform, a slick Silicon Valley venture backed venture backed version of what has so far been a set of light hearted experiments.” And so basically, it’s AI powered avatars of 17 leading presidential candidates. Each of the chat bots is trained on reams of data generated from at least 100 sources like candidates, video appearances, writings, and users can query these bots individually and ask the same question of all 17 at once to them against each other in one on one debate directed by user input. Right. So Politico tested out this bot and found it held up all right, and seemed to relatively-well recommend respond as if the candidates were responding, which could be a really interesting way for people to interact with candidates ideas in 2024, assuming it has accurate, which we cannot we know with chatbots. But, you know, if you have something like so much information about what candidates have said on policies, it’s reasonable that if you train an AI on that data set, you might be able to get, you know, a reasonable representation of where a candidate stands on something to a specific question. I wonder if they will, if the AI can accurately capture the dodges though and the refusal to answer questions.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right and the flim flamery and the answering the questions you want to answer instead of the question that was actually asked.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, yes, yes. So I haven’t tried it out myself. But I think it’s fascinating. So to follow up on that is something from back in August, which is, you know, I love me some federal register. The Federal Election Commission has a a notice of availability of a petition for rulemaking, which is basically where the federal government I know it’s so

Kai Ryssdal 

Wait say it again, it’s a notice of availability for proposed federal rulemaking? Do I have that right?

Kimberly Adams 

No, it’s a notice of availability of a petition for rulemaking. And a petition for rulemaking is basically what a public citizen puts out. Okay. Let me just read this. This is from the supplementary information the Federal Register. “On July 13 2023, the Commission received a petition for rulemaking from from public citizen, a nonprofit advocacy organization. The petition asked the commission to mandate regulation on fraudulent misrepresentation to clarify that the restrictions and penalties of the law and the Code of Regulations are applicable should candidates or their agents fraudulently misrepresent other candidates or political parties, through deliberately false artificial intelligence generated content and campaign ads or other communications.” This is a advocacy group asking the federal government for the love of God, please make a rule saying candidates can’t do this. Yeah, yeah. And so the bureaucracy grinds on. And there is it’s open for public comment until October the 16th 16th. Now, is there any reasonable expectation that rules about this will be done in time for the election? Doubtful. But there’s a process for it, and if anybody wants to weigh in federalregister.gov, and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

Kai Ryssdal 

Wow. It’s almost disturbing how much glee you took in that. Oh my god.

Kimberly Adams 

Because like, you know, there are so many aspects of government that we just have to shake our heads at and just be like, man, and leave it alone. And just, you know, we’re gonna end up talking about the government shutdown, sooner rather than later. And we kind of just have to throw our hands up in the air and be like, Well, Congress, what do you do? But with this kind of stuff? It’s like, well, here’s what you do. We are worried about AI and its role in elections. Do they have to take people’s comments seriously, do they have to incorporate them into rulemaking? No, but you can at least try.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right? Right, man. Okay, so mine, I almost put mine in the in the smile section. But then I didn’t, because I think it speaks to something larger. So I don’t even know how to say this with a straight face. There has been a conspiracy movement afoot on the social medias and in the wider internet. For the past number of days, the John Fetterman, the junior senator from the great state of Pennsylvania, actually the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, who, as many people know had a stroke during his campaign was self-admitted the hospital for severe depression after he got to the Senate with you know, lingering effects of that stroke and challenges he was having. He now apparently is doing way better with his speech with his comprehension of what things are being said to him and his ability to respond. So that’s all positive. But there is now a movement afoot by conspiracy theorists out there, that Fetterman has been replaced in the Senate of the United States with a body double. Now, if it were me, or Chuck Schumer, or almost any other person on the planet, that would be plausible. But John Fetterman is six feet eight inches tall. He is perhaps the most distinctive looking person in America, if not the world, he is hulking, He is bald. He is lumbering. He wears Carhartt shirts and pants and shorts on the floor of the Senate now, now, which is a whole, it’s a whole other thing. And it is, and I say this, we’re trying not to be pejorative, but it is detached from reality to think that he has been replaced by a body double. You can find him, maybe you could, I don’t know. The Washington Post did a great analysis of this and how rare a physical specimen he is, right at 6’8, 270. Like, like vanishingly small, you know, like 14 decimal place, percentages of people on the planet look like him. Anyway. So I was going to put on the make me smile, because it is kind of funny. It’s kind of ridiculous. But it also speaks to a larger, people are willing to believe things that are just outlandish, which gets us back to much of what is happening in this country. And say no more, say no more. But I just it I just can’t with this. It’s we have to have some common understanding of reality.

Kimberly Adams 

Which is going to be a lot harder with very convincing AI images.

Kai Ryssdal 

Especially that, nicely done. Very nice.

Kimberly Adams 

It works sometimes. But you know, there’s there’s a need, there’s a need here. So and we are going to be having a lot more conversations between now and Election Day about what people choose to believe and what they are led to believe.

Kai Ryssdal

That’s exactly right. And and who leads them down that path? And I think that’s gonna be a bigger part of the national conversation, not necessarily what is true but what we make true to ourselves.

Kai Ryssdal 

Kimberly Adams with a sensible follow up and encapsulation of my, “What is this? This is crazy!” comment.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I mean, I was on here the other day like how do we lose a plane? And you explained that so we balance? Okay, let’s smile I have been holding on to this since Monday.

Kai Ryssdal

Okay, go ahead.

Kimberly Adams

That’s why I was so disappointed to not have my smile on Monday after a deep dark conversation about the state of the democracy. Anyway, my story is about Santa. And don’t worry, parents, you can keep listening. So as of September the 18th, I believe, yes, as of September the 18th. The USPS is accepting letters to Santa and not just Santa in general, but specifically to something that I didn’t even know existed, which is called Operation Santa. So there’s an actual address that parents or children, children, ideally, I think can send a letter to. And the letters are going to be uploaded to USPS operationsanta.com, the website, and then people can go online and choose to fulfill people’s Christmas wishes. And like get get the gifts for people who might, you know, be struggling this holiday season. And so that website is open for letter adoption on November 20. But the letters to Santa need to be postmarked by December 11. And so if you are you know, somebody who might be, you know, struggling a little bit with a Christmas list this year, if that is the holiday you celebrate, this is a thing that exists. I didn’t know it. It’s 111 year old program, run by the Postal Service. And I just think that’s really nice that people go out of their way to, you know, make somebody’s wishes come true. I think that’s really cool. That made me smile. Super cool. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right, my, my, mine’s a little less nice and

Kimberly Adams

Heartwarming.

Kai Ryssdal

Heartwarming, thank you for that. There’s an amazing piece in Bloomberg. It’s a piece about data journalism and visual journalism. And oh, that’s what’s going on. So so the good people at Bloomberg who have the sticktoitiveness, to figure this out, got to look into why wait times at Starbucks are long for a third of people now it’s more than five minutes to you know, basically get a fancy cup of coffee. And what they have discovered by doing actually doing the legwork is is that if you order a coffee latte, at Starbucks, there are and I am not making this number up 383,201,280,000 possible drinks that can be made between pumps and squirts and half calf’s and sweeteners, and all of those different things. 383 billion versions. Now the amazing part of this is that that’s a real operational challenge for Starbucks, because people go in there and they see they have to wait for coffee, right? They’re like, forget it. I’ll just get someplace, something, someplace else. And so wait times are up. So the company is now spending billions of dollars to get that wait time down, including and up to using starting to use smaller ice cubes because they are easier to scoop. It’s like an operations analysis problem. It’s a customer flow problem. It’s super interesting. And it’s not a long piece we’ll put in the show notes.

Kimberly Adams 

This chart is astonishing.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s crazy, isn’t it?

Kimberly Adams 

Wow, this chart is I mean, like I just kept scrolling and I was like, Oh my gosh, oh, wow. There’s more to it. We had some people from USA facts come into the DC Bureau like last week, and they brought this entire book of just like infographics and charts. Oh yeah. details and facts about America. And we were just looking at pictures for like hours after that.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, numbers are amazing. Okie dokie. That’s it. Yes, that is for us today. It’s been a weird one. We will be back tomorrow. Both of us way more in tune with like life I think and but in the meantime, keep sending your thoughts, questions, suggestions, smiles because we’re often searching for them. To us we are at 508-U-B-SMART. We are also at makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Drew Jostad. Our intern is Niloufar Shabandi.

Kimberly Adams 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producers Marissa Cabrera and Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.