Dem
54
GOP
46
While the air war is always important in a campaign, so is the ground war. Voters are much more likely to be convinced to switch sides after talking to a campaign worker who explains what his or her candidate wants and how it will help the voter than by watching a slick TV ad. The trouble is that sending ground troops out there to talk to all the voters requires a lot of ground troops that most campaigns don't have.
Enter AI. Candidates can hire specialized AI firms and give them campaign literature to train a chatbot on. This includes candidate speeches, press releases, the candidate's platform and the candidate's website for starters. Then the chatbot sends out text message to voters, asking them to respond by text message. The Democratic firm of Vector Political has had its bots send out 3 million text messages so far. They have gotten 35,000 people to engage in conversations with the bots—without telling the voters they were talking to bots. While the yield is barely over 1%, engaging with 35,000 voters is a lot, especially since it doesn't require any paid workers or volunteers and costs very little. Furthermore, AI can analyze the 35,000 conversations and summarize its findings to the campaign staff. In this way the candidate can get a good idea of what is on the voters' minds. It is almost like running a 35,000-person focus group.
In addition to sucking up data, some AI systems score each person who responds with a score of 0 to 100, with 0 meaning someone who hates the candidate and 100 meaning a potential donor and/or campaign volunteer. This information tells the campaign who to ignore going forward and who to approach and how.
Some of the conversations with the bots have become quite personal in ways they might not have with a campaign worker at the door. It is at least partly analogous to the fact that robopolls have been more accurate than live interviewer polls in some cases because some voters are willing to tell a computer that they are voting for a racist candidate but are not willing to tell a person that, possibly because they fear a person might say "shame on you" whereas they know a computer won't do that.
Some experiments have shown that chatbots can actually get some voters to change their minds. In one experiment the chatbots were 4x more effective at moving voters than TV ads were. Since chatbots are also cheaper than TV ads, expect more of them in the future, for better or worse. (V)