The AI ​​has entered the campaign and nothing major has happened. Perhaps because he has done it below, in an individual capacity – we are talking about municipal politics – and because in Spain the techniques of a lifetime such as buying votes and sandwiches for retirees still work more.
Surely more than one speech has been generated with the help of ChatGPT and has been adapted for the different towns (“Adapta’m this speech for an average population of the coast / of the Urgell channel / of Pallars”) . We have also seen AI applied to the generation of images in a video of the commons or in the Arrels Foundation campaign, which has turned the Barcelona candidates into homeless people. Anyway, I imagined it bigger. I am not referring to an invasion of images, texts and voice recordings that would make it impossible for us to separate the real from the generated, no. I imagined a candidate playing provocatively with AI, if only to grab headlines by taking advantage of the general state of overexcitement and ignorance around the subject.
After the initial flurry of apocalyptic headlines, generative AI has been spreading like an oil slick in different areas, including political communication. ChatGPT paved the way for Microsoft to incorporate its technology into the Bing search engine, and Google to integrate its Bard chat into the search engine (available in 180 countries, but not yet in the EU). To top it all off, Microsoft has integrated generative AI into Windows 11 in a surprise update: a personal assistant capable of summarizing documents, recommending music or helping us make a presentation (and no, it’s not Clippy).
On Google, we do around 100,000 searches every second (8.5 billion a day); it is the most used computational resource in the world. Windows is installed on 63% of computers, of which a third is Windows 11. If we were amazed when ChatGPT broke all the adoption records for a technology, with 100 million users in two months, wait for AI to come to your Microsoft-friendly screen (Apple, what are you waiting for?).
With the generative AI built into Google and Windows I fear that the next campaign will be quite different and we will see the job of spin doctor mutate into that of prompt doctor, specialists in generating texts and images from notes (“promptsâ€) or questions . Whoever asks the best questions will get the best answers, meaning you’ll get the most vibrant speeches, the most compelling programs and the best-looking candidate images. I give the idea to those parties that present ghost lists in municipalities where their candidates have never set foot: set to be fake, let’s do it right.
