When AI brings ‘ugly things’ to democracy
National elections were held in Indonesia this week, and early vote counts suggest that Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto — who was an army lieutenant general during the bloody dictatorship of Suharto and has been accused of facilitating human rights abuses — will claim victory. Subianto ran two unsuccessful campaigns in the past, but this time around, he got a healthy boost from generative artificial intelligence tools, including Midjourney, the source of a cute and cuddly animated Subianto avatar that became his campaign’s signature image. Staffers and consultants who worked on the campaign and down-ballot races also told Reuters that they were using OpenAI’s products to “craft hyper-local campaign strategies and speeches.”
The campaign did this in plain violation of both Midjourney and OpenAI’s usage policies, which specifically prohibit customers from using their technology for political campaigns.
Why didn’t the companies step in? For its part, OpenAI told Reuters that it’s investigating the issue. Midjourney did not comment. Either way, it’s hard not to see a parallel here with Dean Philipps, a longshot Democratic presidential candidate in the U.S. whose campaign used OpenAI’s technology to run a chatbot promoting his messages. Although the campaign was clearly violating company policy, it was only after The Washington Post reported on the bot that OpenAI pulled the plug on the developer who built it.
Both stories raise an important question, especially for OpenAI, the most influential player on the generative AI field at the moment: Apart from acting on media inquiries, what does OpenAI do to mitigate political abuses of its tools? A spokesperson who declined to be named told me that OpenAI uses “automated systems and human review to identify and address violations of our policies on our API.” When violations happen, the company may flag the incident for “human review” or suspend the user altogether. In big-picture terms, the response suggests that OpenAI is following the playbook of its Big Tech forefathers like Facebook and YouTube.