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Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.
AI is Not a Magic “I Win” Button
My friend Jamaa Bickley King dropped a great line on the crowd at the Digital Campaign Summit a few weeks ago: For political campaigns, AI is not an “I Win” button. The audience replied with knowing laughter, since they understood that you can’t just flip a switch and have AI run a campaign.
That moment came to mind recently when I was talking with a new friend who works at a corporate consulting firm. Her communications team had been allowed/forced to dwindle even as the company spent heavily on AI tools. Naturally, a problem arose. They had a lot of expensive AI tokens, but no one to use them.
For political campaigns and communicators, AI platforms can be a powerful ally. They help us crank out words, parse data, experiment with video ideas, tweak images or generate them from scratch, and a whole lot more. But they can’t do it without a human to prompt them — at least for now.
As Jamaa explained, AI cannot substitute for an actual political campaign. It can help staff get more work done in less time, but it can’t and won’t replace them. If you need to turn a press release into a bunch of social-media posts optimized for various platforms, Claude’s got you covered. But the process requires someone to know which messages are important to highlight and which platforms to employ. Without people who understand politics to put it to work, Claude’s not helping persuade voters to do much of anything — apparently, not even as a source of news.
Years ago, a candidate called me who’d managed to get a line on the ballot for lieutenant governor in a tech-focused state (three guesses which one). She’d decided that she was going to position herself as “the blockchain candidate”, but she had hit a speed bump: she didn’t know what being “the blockchain candidate” actually.
Neither did I! Though she seemed to expect me to work magic and help her ride the blockchain to victory over better-known opponents. Not surprisingly, she didn’t appear to have a firm grasp of what blockchain technology involved, but she did know a good buzzword when she heard it. Tragically, when she asked me to work for her, I demurred. And despite good ballot placement, I don’t think her campaign ever really got going, and she certainly came nowhere close to winning. The blockchain, alas, did not suffice.
Some campaigns will always try to make news with an intriguing or novel AI application, as Dean Phillips did a couple of years ago — until his audio chatbot got kicked off of OpenAI. Candidates have used their adoption of digital tech to portray themselves as forward-thinking for years, at least back to the era of Second Life. A good press hit is a good press hit, even when the tech in question isn’t actually doing much practical work for the campaign.
The AI hype cycle is still rolling strong, despite a nagging sense that artificial intelligence as we know it may not add as much to corporate productivity as it does to corporate costs. But with voters increasingly skeptical or downright hostile to it, campaigns may find that AI adoption doesn’t yield much of a PR boost, if any. Perhaps that will spare us this year from some of the “gee whiz” coverage political tech often generates.
Which takes us back to AI’s practical political applications. For campaigns, AI can help a small team fight at the same level as a much larger one, and it can help a larger one get even more done. But you have to have that team in the first place, and they must have the political talent, experience or expertise to know what to do with the technology. Otherwise, AI is just another shiny box on the shelf.
– cpd