During elections, the media and politicians rely heavily on poll results. According to an article published by Harvard Universitythese surveys could soon be entrusted to artificial intelligence. The problem is that their reliability is decreasing, mainly because there are fewer and fewer people willing to answer them.

The idea would be to use large language models (LLM) to analyze web content in real time, with all reviews posted on the social networkssocial networks. It is then possible to create AI agents conditioned to respond in the manner of a very specific demographic segment, for example by selecting age group, gender or political beliefs. Some researchers have already created thousands of AI agents to answer surveys. In addition, it allows them to send specific questions, news articles or even hypothetical scenarios to find out their reaction.

Virtual politicians for direct democracy?

This could lead to virtual politicians, able to adapt their speech in real time according to the opinion of the population, and even respond personally to each voter. And this is not a purely hypothetical idea. The first virtual politician is currently campaigning for the general election to be held on July 4 in the United Kingdom. His name is AI Steve and he is the avatar of Steven Endacott, a businessman based in Brighton. AI Steve is capable of holding 10,000 simultaneous conversations with the audience, and the AI ​​will integrate the responses and suggestions directly into its platform.

AI may generate legislative proposals, but the system has a RailingRailing. They will first have to go through human “validators” – members of the public who will have to indicate whether these proposals are sensible and whether they support them. AI Steve could therefore represent a form of direct democracy. However, the AI ​​has only been online for a few days, so we will have to wait and see if this experiment proves conclusive.