Ultimate tool for propaganda and manipulation tailored to each person's taste. Highly scalable and can focus on the things you (don't) care about when presenting "both sides".

The stakes are too high for it to not be weaponized, the only question is who will control it.

What's stopping someone from paying to influence AI results?

> Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on

Big time. At best in more rural areas, you will find a facebook page for the candidate. Sometimes, there is nothing they put out and just maybe one of those "we interviewed the candidate and this is what they said" type sites. Sometimes, nothing at all and it is a real shame. It would solve a lot of problems if we knew more about our local school administrations, mayors, sheriffs, etc.

> focusing on what they candidates say/have done

who's going to cross check it? and even if everyone did, who's going to ensure that everything everything is mentioned, things can fact check just fine with some strategic omissions.

> focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system.

How often have you looked into two candidates at any level above city council and decided that the "red vs blue" assumptions differ from who you would normally vote for? Add in a few specifying sub-labels (MAGA, DSA) and that number probably drops to insignificant.

Homogenizing opinion though a small number of private companies with their own incentives is a pretty terrible idea, actually.

The current system isn't perfect by any means, but at least there's a wide variety of source and experience. Diversity can provide a buffer against viral problems, be it literal living viruses or information.

Funneling information through a handful of sources is akin to Sinclair Broadcast Group buying up rural news stations. Awful for democracy and diversity. Can put us a single virus away from destruction.

I don't think it's a good thing. The good thing would be to have a good education, and local groups with whom to discuss.

Blindly trusting a model that's easy to manipulate is not a good thing

No problem with two companies owned by sociopaths who largely have the same political ideas, and are deeply tied to the current administration, controlling the tool used by the mass to decide who to vote for? Said tool being trained on reddit, twitter and other trash tier platforms where minorities of radicalised people on both side of the spectrum "discuss" political topics 90% of people do not care about.

Yeah, we're cooked chat, as they say

>> Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

A spin on that I used for my local elections last year: My prompt stated the issues that were important to me and why. I then copied in any election guide I could find from newspapers, blogs, newsletters, endorsements, etc.

Then I asked for 1) which best fits my priorities, and 2) risks for each (eg "says they will support homelessness programs, has no direct experience in an elected position")

> using their own brains

Nonsense. There's no "using your own brains" in voting in the midterms. You get no information about the vast majority of the candidates, you're just expected to vote as the party tells you to, and the rest of the information you get is from PR firms in proportion to the millions spent to market to you and distort all the information that you could possibly find.

Even if you work your hardest and get a reasonable overview, you've dedicated far more of your time to this than anyone could be expected to (a sign of the leisure and access you have as a privileged middle-class person), and the vote will be necessarily decided by the vast majority who didn't.

People using LLMs for the midterms will be the best informed voters we've had in a long time, even if they use Grok (which will desperately try to lie to them, and won't be the only one.) They should also use LLMs to help them with strategies to get to an actual voting booth, because the parties like to sabotage voting in places they feel they'll be weak.

You seem to think everybody (but you) is a dummy and will just do what the LLM says to do, but were totally comfortable for them just doing what the party says to do. I might use an LLM myself to figure out what's going on with judges, if I can find one with access to the proper databases.

In fact, if you want to do good for the world, get access to good databases with good search engines, hook deepseek up to them, and open it to the public. People need to find out how judges decide, and if there are any complaints against them, etc.

More like the year of the Whopper imo.

And Grok's competitors doing the opposite is justified?

Solve a trolley problem to align self driving car with your morals.

Your question made me remember the short story 'Franchise', from Asimov.

Like the cookies from Black Mirror.

Not quite that, but close enough that I should disclose I wrote one: ENOF. It starts as a real-world quest game in SF and slowly becomes the government. Instead of an AI voting as you, everyone names a person whose judgment they'd accept, and those delegations chain together into what people start calling the respect graph. You can revoke yours instantly, and a lot of the book is about what goes wrong anyway: bought delegations, one schoolteacher in Lagos ending up with eleven million votes behind her, and eventually who gets the authority to turn the whole thing off. It's on Gumroad now (DRM-free EPUB/PDF): https://simonyuen.gumroad.com/l/enof, Kindle once Amazon finishes processing it.

Seconding Franchise, though. Asimov got to the "one voter stands in for everyone" version in 1955.

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No need. Just create (using an llm) a corpus of websites of "facts" about candidates, made up to your liking, that the LLMs will happily slup up and spit out.

The worst is homogeneously misinformed.

Depends on how they’re being informed I guess. Homogeneously informed can be okay to pretty bad. From mid-century American television and print media all the way down to North Korea and Nazi Germany.

Are they becoming educated? Or are they just adopting the bias of the AI? (Which is the bias of its training data and/or trainers.)

Is it worse than "I asked my coworker"? Yes, because maybe six coworkers total are who the entire country is asking. That's too much influence for a program.

> at least they’re not asking Grok.

To be objective, you should test across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, to see how fair they each are.

I don't believe the American economy ever hinged on the success of the 8-ball, nor the CEO of Hasbro (owners of the Ouija trademark) called before Congress to question whether the boards could build bioweapons.