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General view of the Wyoming State Capitol in Cheyenne, Wyoming, U.S., May 6, 2021. Picture taken May 6, 2021.
The AI who lost an election
A librarian ran for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with a simple promise: Victor Miller would simply be the human vessel for an artificial intelligence that would run the city. He’d be a “humble meat avatar” for the Virtual Integrated Citizen, or VIC, that would make decisions and run the government if elected.
The stunt made national headlines, but voters weren’t enthused. They soundly rejected VIC and its human creator. On Aug. 20, Miller and VIC only received 327 votes out of the 11,036 cast. He placed fourth out of six candidates in the primary, with the top two vote-getters (including the incumbent mayor) advancing to the November election.
Miller’s challenge faced setbacks throughout the process. The Wyoming Secretary of State previously expressed “significant concerns” about VIC appearing — without Miller — on the state ballot, saying there needed to be real human names on the ballot. Then, OpenAI shut down access to VIC, saying it violated rules against political campaigning. (Miller later relaunched the service through OpenAI’s GPT-4 without punishment.)
After conceding, Miller announced he’s forming a new group called the Rational Governance Alliance, which seeks to expand AI decision making to promote “efficient, transparent, and unbiased” governance. So, maybe we can look for RGA candidates, or at least their human stewards, on future ballots.Grand Teton National Park mountains, Jackson, Wyoming, United States of America, North America
Introducing VIC, your AI mayor
Victor Miller isn’t your typical mayoral candidate. Running for mayor of Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming, Mill has pledged to turn executive decision-making responsibilities over to an AI bot called VIC he created on ChatGPT. Miller told Wired magazine that he’ll merely serve as VIC’s “meat puppet.”
State rules wouldn’t let Miller register VIC’s candidate solely as VIC — which stands for Virtual Integrated Citizen — so Miller himself had to be the named candidate on the ballot. Wyoming’s Secretary of State Chuck Gray said he is monitoring this candidacy very closely and noted that “an AI bot is not a qualified elector” under state law.
Whether Miller — or VIC — will be able to remain on the ballot is an open question that tests the limit of state elections laws, an edge case for the AI era that, if Miller has his way, might not seem so strange in a few years.
While officials aren’t usually keen to take orders from a machine, we are starting to see governments use the technology to boost efficiency. The British government, for example, has started a pilot program using AI to streamline its work. So, elected or not, AI is coming to bureaucracies.