Victor Miller is a 42-year-old librarian from Cheyenne, the capital city of Wyoming, with a population around 64,000. He is running for mayor, but he doesn’t seem to want to do any of the usual work the job would entail. Instead, he’d be a sort of AI mayor, letting a ChatGPT-powered chatbot called VIC, short for Virtual Integrated Citizen, run Cheyenne if he wins.
Miller says he would be the chatbot’s “humble meat avatar.” Though he is technically speaking the one on the ballot, in public, he wears a portable Bluetooth speaker around his neck with a built-in microphone so that VIC can receive questions and respond. His role as mayor, in large part, would be to sign the documents it tells him to sign.
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Miller insists this is not a “stunt.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has no prior political experience—of course, he would assume running a city is as easy as typing a query into a chatbot and just doing what it says. And despite Miller’s belief that a ChatGPT bot could perform better than human government officials because it can process vast amounts of information quickly and without error, there’s incredible evidence on the contrary. When it’s wrong, it’s often spectacularly wrong—like catastrophically, embarrassingly wrong.
“It is hard for me to talk about the ‘risks’ of having an AI mayor,” said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor quoted in a great Washington Post story about the situation. “It’s like asking about the risks of replacing a car with a big cardboard cutout of a car. Sure, it looks like a car, but the ‘risk’ is that you no longer have a car.”
At one point in the Post story, Miller demonstrated Vic’s incredible powers of political leadership. VIC argued against banning books, as some schools in Cheyenne have recently done. A perfectly reasonable and wise position. The bot added, “But, let’s create a process ensuring a balanced approach.” It seems even an AI pretending to be a real politician knows how to be vague and useless. It’s kinda hard to govern when you have no political perspective and just regurgitate what you’ve aggregated from online sources.
Rest assured, Miller and VIC’s chances of winning the Cheyenne mayoral race aren’t great. The incumbent mayor is running again and so is the runner-up in the last election. Though Miller’s experiment raises some interesting questions about what people want in a politician, this isn’t not what people want to use AI for, really—apparently, most would prefer it was writing erotic fiction.
