The AI ​​has entered the campaign and nothing big has happened. Perhaps because he has done it below, individually —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 discourse has been generated with the help of ChatGPT and has been adapted for different towns (“adapt me this discourse for an average population of the coast / the Urgell channel / Pallars”). We have also seen AI applied to the generation of images in a video of the Comuns or in the Fundació Arrels campaign, which has made the Barcelona candidates homeless.

In any case, I imagined it bigger. I am not referring to an invasion of images, texts and voice recordings that made it impossible for us to distinguish what was real from what was generated, no. I imagined some candidacy 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 fever of apocalyptic headlines, generative AI has been spreading like an oil stain to different areas, including political communication. ChatGPT paved the way for Microsoft incorporating its technology into the Bing search engine, and Google integrating its Bard chat into the search engine (available in 180 countries, but not yet in the EU). As if that were not enough, 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).

At Google we perform almost 100,000 searches every second (8.5 billion a day); It is the most used computing resource in the world. Windows is installed on 63% of computers, of which a third is Windows 11. If we marvel when ChatGPT broke all technology adoption records, with 100 million users in two months, wait for AI to arrive to your friendly screen by the hand of Microsoft (Apple, what are you waiting for?).

With the generative AI integrated into Google and Windows, I am afraid that the next campaign will be quite different and we will see the work of spin doctor mutate into that of prompt doctor, specialists in generating texts and images from notes (prompts) or questions. Whoever asks the best questions will have the best answers, that is, they will get the most vibrant speeches, the most convincing programs and the most handsome images of candidates. I give the idea to those parties that present ghost lists to municipalities where their candidates have never set foot: since they are false, let’s do it well.