A Dutchman threw a artificial intelligence project which explores how a divided United States could be reunited. Here is “the bipartisan president”.
To create the bipartisan president Jeroen van der Most (aka simply Most) used the language model GPT-3 to generate a series of politically neutral slogans. Then he merged them with a nightmare mashup of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the current candidates in the US presidential election.
Producing the slogans was a rather laborious process. It all started by giving GPT-3 the following three prompts:
- Ideas for slogans for a conservative political campaign;
- Slogan for a liberal political campaign;
- Ideas for slogans for a bipartisan political campaign.
But the model struggled to understand the categories.
For example, when asked for a liberal slogan, he initially responded with things like “Lower taxes, bigger military.”
It didn't sound right to Most, so he only selected slogans he personally considered conservative, liberal, or bipartisan.
These slogans were then validated through an existing algorithm that tries to determine whether a text excerpt was written by a conservative or a liberal. Slogans that were classified as a mix of the two ideologies were considered bipartisan.
A bipartisan president who makes everyone agree
For a country so divided and seriously at risk of social stability, these US presidential elections are not a cure-all, quite the contrary. A bipartisan president appreciated by both conservatives and liberals could increase cohesion: perhaps by using some of these slogans.
Those who scored on both the conservative and liberal scales were entered into GPT-3. At that point with the prompt “Slogan ideas for a bipartisan campaign”, the artificial intelligence did its duty.
Here are some example “workhorses” that came out of AI for a bipartisan president who would be popular in the US presidential election:
Win the Future – Winning the future
America Forward – America Avanti
Renewing the American – Renewing the American
Would an “AI-born” president win the US presidential election?
The slogans thus obtained were screened again by the algorithm to double-check that the outputs had obtained scores on both a liberal and a conservative scale.
Finally, Most checked whether the results had already been used by advocacy groups or political initiatives by running them through a Google search API.
Bipartisan slogans, we note, avoid concrete political issues, such as the "climate crisis" or the "strengthening of the armed forces". Instead, they express broad, almost inspirational sentiments that contain little substance.
Is this a sign that to get everyone to agree we need to fly high ("Hope" by Obama, for example) or simply that it is better never to go into specifics?
The experiment would suggest that the next step is to create a campaign for the US presidential elections with the help of artificial intelligence. Indeed, AI can be used to define bipartisan policies that have broad consensus.
AI could also help to automatically develop a “diagnostic” tool that signals when a politician is avoiding important issues. A sort of "concreteness index".
After all, looking at him, this bipartisan president would be full of empty rhetoric.
It gives me the feeling that a truly bipartisan narrative ends up being just an illusion, which would even be dangerous, for the USA as for any other state.
