[CognitiveLens]

I read the first part of your post assuming you were being sarcastic about people's expectations that every mention of AI must be about a revolutionary technical advance rather than novel applications of existing tech. But I think you're serious - the news isn't "AI has made a big advance", the news is "people are testing the idea that AI might be better at policy decisions than some humans" - and that's interesting.

There is a lot of evidence that many politicians don't have even a ChatGPT-level grasp of public policy, the legal system, or economics, but make up for it by being charming, personable, or subjectively "inspiring". It's fascinating to think about what a GPT would do with all the information that politicians have to work with, and whether that could actually result in more effective political decision making.

Yes, letting ChatGPT call the shots doesn't solve the problem of actually _getting things done_, but that doesn't trivialize the effort to elect a "human being enacting ChatGPT instructions".

As a side note, I smile at the idea that a GPT chatbot is a "simple" thing - how quickly we become inured to incredibly complex technology dressed up to be easily consumable.

[kryptiskt]

I don't see how you can ascribe competency in making decisions to ChatGPT. It doesn't have a personality or any fixed opinions. You can make it output just about any decision you want, good or bad or weird, by giving it the right prompt.

Handing over decision making to a GPT would just be handing over the power to the one who writes the prompts.

[CognitiveLens]

I'm probably too cynical, but a strong "personality and fixed opinions" doesn't really give me a lot of confidence in a human being's competency (I also wouldn't use the word "competency" to describe an AI). The person writing the prompts can absolutely bend an AI's output toward their preferences, which is a real danger.

It would be interesting to be able to have a public record of both the input and the output for stuff like this - maybe a future where we have votes for "County Prompt Engineer", and candidates get to show off the prompts that best demonstrate their ability to get 'competent' responses that have resulted in life improvements for their constituency!

At the very least, ChatGPT will admit a mistake when someone points it out. "I'm sorry for the error, you are indeed correct that corruption is unacceptable, here is my revised proposal:"

[latentsea]

I guess the part about policy decisions that ChatGPT might not be so good at is all the politicking that goes into them...