Meet Ashley, the first AI political campaign caller

 “Are you familiar with Shamaine Daniels and her campaign for Congress?”

This political campaign call is from Ashley – a new artificial intelligence volunteer.

She's part of a new era of political campaigning being ushered in by generative AI.

But some warn tools like Ashley could make disinformation in American politics worse.

Democrat Shamaine Daniels is running for Congress in Pennsylvania.

Last year, Daniels lost to Trump-aligned Republican Scott Perry.

This time around, she's looking for help from Ashley — who can speak 20 languages — to reach more voters.

"You know, when I was initially approached about thinking about this, you know, my first thought was one of the things that we are very poor at is reaching diverse populations."

"The goal for me in using this tool is to expand those who can participate in the campaigning process."

Ashley’s creator is a startup called Civox.

It says she’s the first political phone banker powered by generative AI.

And that this tech is going to scale – fast.

CEO Ilya Mouzykantskii says his firm plans mainly to work with Democrats.

"Each call is unique before a number is called. There is a set of data that the campaign already knows about the person they're calling. Sometimes that can be as basic as a first name and last name. Or sometimes it can be a lot more detailed than that. And based on that information, we are able to have conversations that are customized to the recipient, and that's done on the fly."

Some are worried.

In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified in Congress that he was “nervous” about generative AI’s ability to compromise election integrity through “one-on-one interactive disinformation.”

Others say this tech could worsen disinformation in the polarized landscape of American politics that’s already battling "deepfakes”….

…realistic but fabricated videos and images created using AI algorithms.

The federal communications and election commissions are looking into AI…

but so far there are no rules that directly apply to Ashley's work.

John Basl at Northeastern University says that’s a problem.

"They just pollute or can pollute our information ecosystem. And it's not just that we don't have the tools to fight that, people aren't quite prepared. Like we see this all the time when people go to use ChatGPT for something and then are surprised when it hallucinates or makes up something that's not quite true."

Civox says it welcomes regulation.

And that it intentionally makes Ashley sound like a bot and disclose that it's AI – despite not being legally required to do so.

https://news.yahoo.com/meet-ashley-first-ai-political-010108486.html