[chronotis]

Former (failed) candidate here, state legislative race in a smaller state that's not generally described as competitive. Money = time. When large donors can deploy large amounts of cash, it relieves you of the need to spend tons of time raising money and you can instead spend that time on other things of greater ROI or that can scale your outreach to a larger audience.

[arduanika]

I guess that means that now, AI is helping these politicians save time and increase their productivity!

[chronotis]

There are some efforts to do exactly that, though overall I'd observe that the general level of technological sophistication / early adopter-ism is pretty low in the politician cohort. There are tools for developing campaign plans, direct mail messaging, text campaign content, etc.; we used AI social media ad generation tools to help fill our content pipeline. We developed some internal tools to assist with direct mail fundraising letters to PACs / labor unions / etc.

[arduanika]

Not exactly what I was joking about, but interesting nonetheless.

I suppose some amount of adoption by politicians and staffers is good, so that they can see what this new thing is, and crucially, what it is not. But of course it comes at the cost of making a new class of errors. Hopefully these will be contained enough to mainly just serve as a learning experience for them.

[xyst]

That is awful. Corporate money, billionaires need to stay out of politics.

Yet another reason why Citizens United v FEC was an absolute mistake.

[chronotis]

I wouldn't object, though I also don't see how to put the genie back in the Citizens United bottle.

[kridsdale1]

Amend the constitution. All campaigns can only spend so much money. Other countries have done this.