Political campaigns embrace AI to reach voters across language barriers

With a country that speaks over a hundred languages and countless more dialects, AI tools are already widely used in translation and marketing services. Political campaigns around the world however, have been slow to adopt the technology, in part out of concerns around disinformation. But as the technology proves itself more, campaigns are starting to explore large language models (LLMs) as a new way to do voter outreach — particularly when there’s a language barrier involved.

Still, many people fluent in low-resource languages have already lowered their expectations for how well an LLM tool can speak their language.

Ananya Bhattacharya of Rest of world spoke with Urvashi Aneja to understand her perspective on this move:

Urvashi Aneja, founding director of Digital Futures Lab, told Rest of World that she sees lots of AI skepticism in her work doing regional language outreach in India. While building a contextualised data set for AI tools will help, “it requires resources, and it requires funding,” she said. “I think it also creates a new entry point for [a] kind of bias … What are the information points that you’re putting in? What are the kind of prompts that you’re putting in?”

So far, most locals are unimpressed with the latest generation of tools. “Most of them are saying they are pretty happy with Google Translate,” Aneja said. “They don’t see a huge difference with ChatGPT.”

These are excerpts from the original piece published here.