In San Francisco, AI is everywhere.
Just about every billboard on the side of the road is some ad for another startup made to replace human workers. That ubiquity has now entered politics in the highly charged race to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress, with two leading contenders in Scott Wiener and Connie Chan.
Wiener’s campaign created an AI avatar of Chan, advertised as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask.” It took a known criticism of Chan, but when placed into first-person form, began to feel less like political discourse and more like an offensive caricature.
The defence of the bot was far more telling. Wiener’s campaign argued that nobody who interacted with it would reasonably have thought it was Connie Chan.
This raises the question of what the AI was doing in the first place.
