I can appreciate why companies would not want to be attached to politics in this way, or accused of influencing elections.

At the same time, as long as this person is consenting to this (which clearly seems to be the case), I don't think the developers did anything wrong (malum in se).

I suppose this is a use-case where people will turn to locally-run models.

This is politics - attempting to treat specific situations reasonably is the fast path to a kerfuffle. Note that if Phillips' campaign thinks this would have been good for him, it might easily be perceived bad for someone else. And that is an unstable equilibrium that easily leads to political escalations using OpenAI technology.

Clear lines on what shan't be done (lines drawn far away from the real grey areas) is a position that is both prudent and respectable by OpenAI.

Yes, I agree. OpenAI is wise to take this course, and the campaign won't be wrong to work around it by using an open model (in my opinion).

Yes, it's apparently consensual and transparent:

> Dean.Bot didn’t all-out pretend to be Phillips himself; before engaging with Dean.Bot, website visitors would be shown a disclaimer describing the nature of the chatbot.

dupe.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39081422

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

I believe we will see the day when we have an LLM model running for President. Thinking about it...maybe we should start with the Supreme Court...

> I believe we will see the day when we have an LLM model running for President.

An LLM would probably win a landslide victory over its (human) opposition, if the voters don't know that they are voting for a robot.

We (the voters) could also have our own LLMs that the candidate LLM would have to convince to vote for them. We can totally abstract away the whole campaigning BS, just let the LLMs duke it out for us!

A robot ran for president in 2016 and lost.

<http://i.imgur.com/bv7W2x3.gifv>

(I'll have you know that Hillary only had to rehearse this quasi human-like reaction for three hours beforehand with her staff.)

> maybe we should start with the Supreme Court...

sounds like that's going to be more of a textualist than living document LLM ;-)

> LLM model running for President

It would need to be 35 years old and born in the USA.

Just use a proxy human to pass through the output from the LLM

I think Neal Stephenson’s vision in Interface is more likely. An AI augmented candidate that adjusts and responds to sentiment in near real time with the right signals coming in, trained to manipulate and appeal.

It feels kind of weird to do this to me. Isn’t this what is often touted as free speech?

OpenAI is not a government entity.