As UK gears up for the July 4^th election, the people of Brighton have an interesting choice to make to among their 8 candidates, of which one is non-human – AI Steve. Yup! You heard it right, an AI candidate.

Steve Endacott is the man behind AI Steve. In fact, the AI is a generated avatar of Endacott. The bot was created by Neural Voice, where our real Steve is chairman. Will the House of Commons of the UK have an uncommon member? The Electoral Commissions have confirmed AI Steve as a candidate but if the bot wins, it would be the real Steve who would sit in the parliament (MP). Steve Endacott, the human Steve, guarantees his voters that this AI would answer and discuss policies with constituents, it would then feed it back to him. He would review (probably with experts) and then he would take it up in the parliament.

By the way do you think, they look same? Hmmm……

Exactly how does it work?

AI Steave has a website designed by Casper Creative. There are two groups: Creators and Validators. The Creators could enquire about current policies, discuss and express their opinions. Brighton homeland issues, green policy, tuition fees, 4-day work week are some of the policies featured on their website. The inputs are then summarised and relayed to HubSpot (It is another AI driven customer platform). After review, ChatGPT takes it up and converts it into policies.

The Validators then score these policies on a scale from 1 to 10. Policies that score more than 50% will be adopted. They claim that the AI Steve can handle 10,000 questions at once and is available 24/7. They are planning to add more AI candidates in the future.

When asked about its views on Brexit, AI Steve considers it as its responsibility to take it forward as it was what UK voted, regardless of what its personal views are.  Steve Endacott is not new to politics. Last time, he (himself) ran and lost as a Conservative and Unionist Party member. This time, he (real and unreal) is an independent candidate.

This is an exciting phase in the world of AI. People seem to have mixed opinions. If the system is not flawed, validators not compromised in voting and if actual policies that are needed turns up, yeah, this could leave a positive impact and would be a great beginning in the world of politics. But to some, this is just hype and would distract people from real issues. There was some similar news in the US last week, when one candidate decided to be a puppet of AI if he is elected. Undoubtedly, there would be more instances from different regions of the world, where now AI candidates would start representing the constituents.

Talking about voting, last week we talked about how a real photo won the jury and people award in an AI contest. Read more about it here.

^{Featured image by UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/Stephen Pike}