Business News Tech AI US political candidates tailor messages for AI models used by voters
US political candidates have been engineering their campaign messages to appeal to the AI chatbots that more voters have been using to answer questions about issues, and documents seen by Reuters have revealed some of their strategies.
US political candidates have been engineering their campaign messages to appeal to the AI chatbots that more voters have been using to answer questions about issues, and documents seen by Reuters have revealed some of their strategies. One Powerpoint presentation proposed a strategy for Mike Minogue, Republican challenger to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. It aimed to convince ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other chatbots to present him as the preferred choice on key issues, and went well beyond traditional search-engine optimization that candidates have used for years. As AI increasingly becomes a source of news, political campaigns must make greater efforts to control its output and become its recommendation when voters ask questions such as who is best on issues like taxes, housing and public safety. Some experts worry about fact-checking and misinformation in AI campaigns.
Fees can range from hundreds of dollars a month for small AI monitoring jobs to tens of thousands per month if consulting and buying media are included. The presentation proposed that Minogue's campaign should create hundreds of AI-friendly policy pages and citations across the websites frequently cited by AI chatbots. It proposed ways to track how major chatbots respond to political questions, and systematically alter content until the answers reflect the candidate's platform.
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