New York City Council Member-Elect Used AI To Answer Questions (theverge.com) 29
Susan Zhuang, a Democrat who will soon represent the 43rd Council District in Brooklyn, New York, admitted to using AI when answering questions from a local news publication, according to a report by the New York Post. From a report: In a text message sent to the Post, Zhuang wrote that she uses "AI as a tool to help foster deeper understanding" because English is not her first language. The responses in question were included in an article from City & State, which asked local council member-elects to fill out a questionnaire about their personal interests and policies.
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Re:ai seems great - for fraud deceit and corruptio (Score:4, Funny)
please tell me how i can use AI to utilize blockchains for crypto in cloud to achieve synergies to usher is a new paradigm.
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Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Chat-GPT is already 100x more articulate than most of our politicians
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And ChatGPT would probably write better laws than most politicians.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, most politicians have staff to write their press releases and speeches.
what is novel is using a machine rather than the party-machine.
More broadly, should immigrants be excluded from public life where their communication isn't at the level of a first-language speaker? Here in Melbourne we had a Cantonese-speaking Lord Mayor, John So. His English conversation skills were parodied, even by himself. But people seemed to like him and he was elected to a second term with a much bigger margin.
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Nope, they should not be excluded.
However communicating is a rather important element of being a representative of any kind in a representative democracy. So not having strong ability in the local language will be a significant impediment, and voters should give consideration to that.
I think they can't read/write/speak the language fluently is a perfectly valid reason to prefer another candidate. It should not be looked upon in the negative way we might regard some other bias like "I'd rather not vote for
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Yep... exactly. If you're an American citizen and eligible by all the existing rules to run for a political office, then I don't think any new rules or restrictions are needed. But inability to communicate well in English is a problem, and that goes as much for writing as it does for speech. It's simply a huge part of the job.
Trying to use AI chatbots to write your communications instead of a human staff member with some level of proficiency in doing it is a mistake, no matter how "tech savvy" or "forward-
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Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, most politicians have staff to write their press releases and speeches.
So others pay staff to write insincere text while she pays nothing to use an AI to write text that is no less insincere.
At least she is frugal. That's a good sign.
More broadly, should immigrants be excluded from public life
Who is and isn't fit for public office should be decided by the voters.
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decided by the voters.
Yeah, Trump in 2024.
Considering his mediocre performance as president and indirect cause/support of sedition, he should not be this popular: It is scary. The Democrat Party won't repeat their "No-one will vote for that PoS, we can nominate the dumbest person in Washington" policy but more is needed to end the celebrity worship in the current campaign.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
The Democrats have two choices:
1. Figure out how to talk to rural and small-town Americans and address their concerns.
2. Figure out how to ban Trump from the ballot.
So far, they're focusing on #2. That's a lot easier than #1.
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Who is and isn't fit for public office should be decided by the voters.
Agreed. Wish we'd drop the foreign born rule so Arnold could run.
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Yes yes, but saying all this? About a woman? A foreigner?? A democrat??? This close to Christmas, only *months* after LGBT History Month???? Don't you care about optics, man?
Not bad (Score:2)
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Who trains the AI?
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Humans are flawed. AI should run society. Truly unbiased, no greed, no self interest. It could operate purely in the common good.
If we could build an AI that isn't already tainted by our biases, this might be true. But thus far we're hell-bent on force-feeding new AIs all of our biases. For "safety" from bad words, from bad thoughts, from bad ideas.
Oh dang. (Score:2)
I'm deeply suspect of her, not for using AI, but for not having some advisor to review that. Anybody could have told her, right from the first line, that it's cringe. "New York City, the concrete jungle where dreams come true", LOL. It reads like some summer intern at the Chamber of Commerce wrote it, and then the real marketing people told him "nice try".
Politics is a people job, and while accented English and a few missing words is fine, you at least have to be able to come up with something like this
Person of Interest in real life (Score:2)
That show is becoming ever more real. :)
questions from local press (Score:2)
..aren't part of the job. She could have asked a 6yo to fill out something for all I care. What's the fuzz?
What bothers me though is that one can be sure next elections, both sides will have AI write speeches and strategies that should yield the most votes. Let the one with the better trained AI (read: mo money) win! /s
Instead of questioning and testing on a fraction of the electorate, the better AI will test on all of the electorate and populism will rule. We ain't seen nothing yet.
A question (Score:3)
Sounds like she was using AI as a better Babel fish: That would be smart thinking since the usual online phrase-dictionary can't process long sentences.
That raises a question: Did she give her answers in English or use AI to translate from her native language?
Problem is using AI but not proofreading (Score:2)
Using generative AI is similar to using Google, Wikipedia, etc. Using these resources to generate answers, sentences, and paragraphs is fine. I use all of the above to research issues all the time, and I also tell my daughter to use these resources, even for homework and projects. However, what's really important is to use these resources as starting points and to look carefully at what is produced, not only for correctness but also for whether those words convey the intended message.
A politician, studen
Oddness (Score:2)
gonative (Score:2)