Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and he’s making an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he’ll: do not have At the helm will be an AI bot: VIC (Virtual Integrated Citizen), a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created that he says has better ideas and understanding of the law than many people currently working in government.
“I realized this organization was a lot smarter than me and, more importantly, a lot better than the outward-looking civil servants I saw,” he said. According to Miller, the VIC would make the decisions and he would serve as its “meat puppet,” attending meetings, signing documents and doing other hands-on work to run the city.
But whether VIC and Victor will be allowed to run in the first place remains an open question.
Because it is illegal for bots to run for public office, Miller said he is technically on the ballot, at least on the candidate papers filed with the state.
When Miller went to the county clerk’s office to file his candidacy, he said, “I didn’t want to use my last name, I wanted to use Vic. So I read the statute and it said I had to print the name that I’m commonly known by. So most people call me Vic. My name is Victor Miller. So on the ballot, Vic is short for Victor Miller the person.”
When he got home from applying, Miller told the then-nameless chatbot about it, and “we actually came up with the name ‘Virtual Integrated Citizen,'” he said.
“We are monitoring this very closely to ensure uniform application of our election laws,” Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said in a statement to WIRED. Gray said people running for office must be “qualified electors,” and that “requires a living, flesh-and-blood human being. Therefore, an AI bot is not a qualified elector.” Gray also wrote to the county clerk expressing his concerns about Victoria, suggesting that Miller’s application be denied.
“Mr. Miller’s application violates both the letter and spirit of Wyoming election law,” Gray wrote in the letter, adding that even if “Vic” represented Mr. Miller and not a bot, it could still violate the law because it doesn’t include Mr. Miller’s full name.
VIC is built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.0, and Miller said he did not contact the company to ask for permission to use its software to build bot candidates. The company has specific guidelines for how its products can be used in elections, but none for bot management.
“We took action against GPT because it violated our policy against political activity,” OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois told WIRED in a statement.
Miller said the company hopes not to take VIC offline, but is open to moving to Meta’s open source Llama 3 if necessary.
VIC/Miller will face off against incumbent Patrick Collins and several other candidates. Collins did not respond to a request for comment about AI’s opponent.
