Over the last month, some Spanish-speaking New Yorkers got a recorded phone call from Mayor Eric Adams speaking their native language. “Hola, soy el alcalde Eric Adams,” the mayor says in a monotone but flawless accent, before launching into a pitch for jobs with the city government. The truth is Adams isn’t multilingual, but he is a pioneer in the AI politics race.
In October, the mayor’s office said he’s been using AI to blast his constituents with millions of robocalls in languages he doesn’t speak, including Yiddish, Spanish, Mandarin, Haitian Creole, and Cantonese.
The real role of current-gen AI in politics should be mainly summarizing the text of laws and bills, so even people who don’t have the time to read everything can stay more or less in the picture, and ask specific questions about the text.
