Thousands of citizen calls every day
AI election worker Ashley supports US Democrats
December 26, 2023, 12:04 a.m
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In Pennsylvania, the Democrats are using a new campaign aid: Ashley is an AI, speaks with a robotic voice in 20 languages and knows the candidate’s program down to the last detail. The inventors assume that citizens will receive such calls on a large scale in the future.
The US Democrat Shamaine Daniels lost the 2022 congressional election against the Republican and Trump supporter Scott Perry. Things aren’t looking good for next year either in the fight for one of Pennsylvania’s seats in the House of Representatives. But Daniels has a new poll worker: the artificial intelligence (AI) Ashley, who makes thousands of calls to potential voters in a weekend. It can do this in 20 languages, all of which deliberately sound like machines.
That’s exactly what caught his attention, says 63-year-old David Fish, one of those called. “What I really liked is that she identified herself as an AI and didn’t try to fool me.”
In the United States, election calls are generally viewed as a nuisance by the public. To put it simply, with normal “robocalls” machines automatically go through voter lists and play a message to everyone who picks up on the landline. Ashley is different: She analyzes the available data about the voters she calls and shapes the conversation according to their political priorities. Good human election workers can do that too. But Ashley is tireless, knows Daniels’ election program down to the smallest detail and doesn’t get frustrated when the people she’s calling hang up and curse.
No legal framework
“This will expand quickly,” says Ilya Mouzykantskii, head of Civox, the London-based company behind Ashley. “We want to make tens of thousands of calls per day by the end of the year and soon reach six figures.” This will happen “on a large scale” in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections, says the 30-year-old. The former computer science student from Stanford and his co-founder Adam Reis from Columbia University do not say which AI models – i.e. programs like ChatGPT from Microsoft partner OpenAI – they use for Ashley. However, there are more than 20.
It is significant for the state of the technology that Reis was able to build the system almost alone. In the past, 50 engineers would have had to work on it for years, he says. Mouzykantskii says he is aware of the risks of his creation. Hence Civox’s decision to give Ashley a distinct machine voice. Mouzykantskii says he would welcome regulation in this area: Other companies could create AIs that would be virtually indistinguishable from humans, but keep their nature secret. There is currently virtually no legal framework in the USA.
A few states, such as Michigan, have regulated or plan to regulate the use of “deepfakes” in election campaigns. Pennsylvania is not one of them. Consumer advocate Robert Weissman from Public Citizen sees no barriers to machines like Ashley: “I don’t know under which federal law that would be illegal.”