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Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of low-effort thing that makes people roll their eyes at AI. A simple GPT chatbot? That's it? It's not even some sort of orchestration system akin to Devin and the like, where it can do/process stuff as an independent agent (which, regardless of success rate, is far more complicated)?

There's... nothing impressive about it at all (I guess the impressive part is "man successfully captures media attention, gets everyone talking about him" - that is an actual challenge, and props to him).

It's also a bit rich to think "this is smarter than me, and so it is definitely smarter than some of the politicians out there". It just smacks of someone who has no idea what political work involves, and thinks a chatbot that can recite legal jargon is literally all it takes to be a politician.

"oh this chatbot can recite all the documentation for all these different libraries, it's way smarter than some developers I've seen"

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I read the first part of your post assuming you were being sarcastic about people's expectations that every mention of AI must be about a revolutionary technical advance rather than novel applications of existing tech. But I think you're serious - the news isn't "AI has made a big advance", the news is "people are testing the idea that AI might be better at policy decisions than some humans" - and that's interesting.

There is a lot of evidence that many politicians don't have even a ChatGPT-level grasp of public policy, the legal system, or economics, but make up for it by being charming, personable, or subjectively "inspiring". It's fascinating to think about what a GPT would do with all the information that politicians have to work with, and whether that could actually result in more effective political decision making.

Yes, letting ChatGPT call the shots doesn't solve the problem of actually _getting things done_, but that doesn't trivialize the effort to elect a "human being enacting ChatGPT instructions".

As a side note, I smile at the idea that a GPT chatbot is a "simple" thing - how quickly we become inured to incredibly complex technology dressed up to be easily consumable.

I guess the part about policy decisions that ChatGPT might not be so good at is all the politicking that goes into them...

I don't see how you can ascribe competency in making decisions to ChatGPT. It doesn't have a personality or any fixed opinions. You can make it output just about any decision you want, good or bad or weird, by giving it the right prompt.

Handing over decision making to a GPT would just be handing over the power to the one who writes the prompts.

I'm probably too cynical, but a strong "personality and fixed opinions" doesn't really give me a lot of confidence in a human being's competency (I also wouldn't use the word "competency" to describe an AI). The person writing the prompts can absolutely bend an AI's output toward their preferences, which is a real danger.

It would be interesting to be able to have a public record of both the input and the output for stuff like this - maybe a future where we have votes for "County Prompt Engineer", and candidates get to show off the prompts that best demonstrate their ability to get 'competent' responses that have resulted in life improvements for their constituency!

At the very least, ChatGPT will admit a mistake when someone points it out. "I'm sorry for the error, you are indeed correct that corruption is unacceptable, here is my revised proposal:"

> It's also a bit rich to think...it is definitely smarter than some of the politicians out there

To be fair, there are some pretty awful politicians out there

Yeah, without being partisan, ChatGPT can definitely and consistently make better decisions then some elected politicians out there.

I would argue that there are a few politicians underperforming random choice or not making choices whatsoever. So it's not exactly a high bar to cross.

It just smacks of someone who has no idea what political work involves...

It also smacks of someone who might be vastly overestimating themselves. There might be a lot of things out there smarter than him, including every other politician, so let's not jump to conclusions just yet.

Being low effort doesn't mean it's not better than the average politician. It also looks more like a protest than an actual candidacy, but specially if elected it would be interesting to see how he'd vote.

For people on HN, we know it’s definitely low effort. For the general population though? Might be enough to get votes.

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