AI candidate running for U.K. parliament to appear on the ballot for general elections in July

06/18/2024 / By Belle Carter

An artificial intelligence character is about to participate in the United Kingdom general elections. AI Steve, alongside non-AI candidates running to represent constituents in the Brighton Pavilion area of Brighton and Hove, will appear on the ballot next month.

Steve Endacott, the man behind the AI candidate, is an entrepreneur from the south of England who wants his avatar to be present in the House of Commons as the Member of the Parliament (MP) for the said constituency. “I am setting up my own party after growing disillusioned with how much the others are out of contact with the U.K. population,” Endacott said in a LinkedIn Post. “I will try to use technology to connect directly with the views of my constituents.” In a separate interview, he said AI Steve is the AI co-pilot. “I’m the real politician going into Parliament, but I’m controlled by my co-pilot,” he said.

Endacott is the chairman of Neural Voice, a company that creates personalized voice assistants for businesses in the form of an AI avatar. Neural Voice’s technology is behind AI Steve, one of the seven characters the company created to showcase its technology.

On its campaign website, AI Steve asks users whether they want to join a team of “creators” that will help them create new policies. Potential voters do this by clicking on a “Speak to AI Steve” option and then filling out personal information before interacting with the bot. Supporters can also become validators, where Steve asks them to “spend just minutes a week” to “act as a control mechanism to stop daft policies” by giving each policy suggestion a rating from one to ten.

“You don’t have to know anything about AI as all you do is press a button to talk to the character,” Endacott said in a statement. “We expect to appeal to a wider audience who don’t want to talk to the AI via the quality of our policies.”

“We are asking them once a week to score our policies from 1 to 10. And if a policy gets more than 50 percent, it gets passed. And that’s the official party policy. Every single policy, I will say that my decision is my voters’ decision. And I’m connected to my voters at any time every week via electronic means.”

The AI candidate responded to NBC News when asked about its stance on Brexit: “As a democracy, the U.K. voted to leave, and it’s my responsibility to implement and optimize this decision regardless of my personal views on the matter.”

In 2022, Endacott unsuccessfully ran in a local election and received less than 500 votes. When his candidacy of “unique nature” was announced, it triggered a conversation on social media platform X. It prompted around 1,000 calls to the AI proxy in one night. (Related: Google’s AI is completely fabricating fake quotes to smear truth-tellers.)

Conservative Party trails Labor Party in polls ahead of U.K. general elections

With the British general elections coming on July 4, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to cut taxes and reduce immigration if his Conservative Party is re-elected.

Sunak admitted that “people are frustrated with our party and frustrated with me.” But he argued that the Conservatives are “the only party with the big ideas to make this country a better place to live.” He also insisted he had not considered resigning and said he was “not going to stop fighting for people’s votes.”

According to surveys, the Conservative Party is trailing the left-of-center Labor Party.

Meanwhile, the Tories’ manifesto was launched on June 11 at the Silverstone motor racing circuit in central England, home of the British Grand Prix.

In its manifesto, the party pledged 17 billion pounds ($22 billion) in tax cuts by 2030, to be paid for largely by slashing welfare costs. The main tax cut is a two-percentage-point reduction in National Insurance. The Conservative government has already cut it twice, from 12 percent to the current eight percent.

On the other side, the Labor Party argues that the tax burden has risen to its highest level in decades during 14 years of Tory rule. Labor campaign chairman Pat McFadden called the Conservative manifesto “the most expensive panic attack in history.”

Visit FutureTech.news to read stories similar to this.

Watch the video below that talks about how artificial intelligence can rig elections.

This video is from the Tanjerea channel on Brighteon.com.