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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

This is probably going to get me lanced, but an LLM trained on a candidates actual positions would probably do more good than whatever sort of messaging avenues we have now - spam text with some talking point, having to actively watch some news channel and hope they aren't lying, go find their campaign website and poke around. I bet most people would rather just text "what are your stances on XYZ?" and then we get elect to pytorch as vice president or something.

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The first LLMs were trained for helpfulness and it shows. However my suspicion is that if they can be trained for helpfulness they can also be trained for rhetorical efficacy and I don't think that will improve the information ecosystem.

Then again, politics is already mired in slimy rhetoric so this probably won't be a cataclysmic change. We already have a few tools to deal with it. AI Debates could be cool. Are cool -- the evidence that convinced me LLMs were special was going on character.ai and pitting a Marx and Hayek character against each other. That was a fun debate with helpful AIs but it would still be a fun debate with rhetorical AIs.

It felt drastically less biased than a campaign worker, so consider yourself only partially lanced.

Is partially lanced better than lanced? Hard to tell

Depends on how deep the boil is.

Or candidates could just publish a paper describing their positions on issues and policy objectives.

But that makes it too easy to lie, omit, and equivocate. If the LLM is trained on all of their public statements over the last X years, and any official documents authored by them, then—theoretically!—you get something that's harder to manipulate.

"As a supporter of Ron DeSantis I can neither confirm or deny if I am more accurate than an official policy document."

Aha. I was thinking you were suggesting it be trained by the campaign. I'm usually bearish about how LLMs are being used, but if you created a corpus of legit sourced documents that humans could peruse, and added a feature to the LLM that allowed it to cite which document(s) it used to answer a question, that would be quite interesting.

Why do you think an LLM, which has no connection to the actual candidate, would be able to give you useful information about said candidate?

What's more likely to happen is that the LLM will try bending and spinning the candidate actual position so it fits to what it perceives you would want it to be.

Yah I’ve long wanted an LLM trained on Bernie Sanders stump speeches (he gave a LOT) that could be called upon to criticize any political writing I find on the web. A little Bernie Bot in the side bar that can comment on news articles. “Enough is enough! The American people are sick and tired!” Hehe.

Enough with the damn emails!

I consider myself a bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig. I want the government to stay out of my life as much as possible. But I don’t have a problem with taxes or providing a safety net to people in need and paying taxes to fund it.

I would love to have an LLM that could respond to any position I gave it from the viewpoint of both Bernie Sanders and a Romney/Bush/WSJ conservative angle.

Whatever the Republican Party overall these days is, it ain’t conservative. On a side note, I do have to give a shout out to my Republican governor Kemp of Georgia, somehow he has managed to stay true to what I would expect from a conservative governor.

I’m not trying to criticize any Democratic governor. I’ve lived in GA all of my life until last year and I don’t follow state politics outside of Ga and FL where I now live (and I won’t open that can of worms)

As a Californian anarcho communist lefty I really respect Kemp and would like to see more of his ilk in the Republican Party!