This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.
Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.
The problem with American campaigns’ current use of AI is that it’s not very different from the web ads of 30 years ago, or television ads before that: they are all about inundating voters with the candidate’s message. This one-to-many broadcasting is an uninspiring way to campaign, but not the only way. AI can help candidates connect one-to-one with as many people as possible. Or it can facilitate many-to-many connections, engaging voters in deliberation about issues at scale.
One of the most promising applications of AI being developed by pro-democracy innovators around the world is broad listening. These tools can collect public input in a format much richer than checkboxes on a survey form.
For example, the newly founded Japanese political party Team Mirai has built a foundation for eliciting public input from voters at scale, in depth, and across the breadth of legislative policy issues. It has developed an AI interviewer to cultivate constituent input on policy. Through extended conversations with this chatbot, voters explore and share their perspectives on specific policy issues. And the party has scaled this across a wide array of policy issues by integrating this functionality with an AI-powered portal for exploring bills.
Team Mirai describes itself as a “utility party”, developing tools for any Japanese political party to use to connect with voters. You might question whether Americans would willingly talk to a political AI. So far, Japanese voters have exchanged more than 300,000 messages across 16,000 AI interviews. Team Mirai grew adoption by providing a real incentive to engage: that talking to their AI interviewer does more than just posting on a platform such as Twitter/X or, equivalently, shouting into a void. Users see evidence that the party is actually listening and might take action on their behalf.
Team Mirai party members have directly cited AI interviews from constituents during legislative committee hearings, published a synthesis of that input back for voters, and even amended their policy platform based on user input. The party has rapidly risen to win 12 seats in the Diet, and is explicitly following in the footsteps of the civic hackers in