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AI Goes to K Street: ChatGPT Turns Lobbyist


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Nay says the significant boost in prediction performance seen between models released just months apart is noteworthy. “There is a clear trend of quickly increasing capabilities.”

Credit: iStock

Concerns around how professional lobbyists distort the political process are nothing new. But new evidence suggests their efforts could soon be turbocharged by increasingly powerful language AI. A proof of concept from a Stanford University researcher shows that the technology behind Internet sensation ChatGPT could help automate efforts to influence politicians.

Political lobbyists spend a lot of time scouring draft bills to assess if they're pertinent to their clients' objectives, and then drafting talking points for speeches, media campaigns, and letters to Congress designed to influence the direction of the legislation. Given recent breakthroughs in the ability of AI-powered services like ChatGPT to analyze and generate text, John Nay, a fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, wanted to investigate whether these models could take over some of that work.

In a matter of days, he was able to piece together a rudimentary AI lobbyist using OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model (LLM), which is the brains behind ChatGPT. In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, he showed that the model was able to predict 75 percent of the time whether a summary of a U.S. congressional bill was relevant to a specific company. What's more, the AI was able to then draft a letter to the bill's sponsor arguing for changes to the legislation.

From IEEE Spectrum
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