- A new Danish political party called The Synthetic Party, with an artificially intelligent representative and AI-based policies, is campaigning for a parliamentary seat and intends to participate in the country’s general election in November.
- The Synthetic Party’s public face and figurehead is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, who has been educated on the ideologies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is supposed to mirror the values of the 20% of Danes who do not vote in elections.
- The Synthetic Party’s goal is to raise awareness about the importance of AI in our lives and how governments can hold AI accountable for biases and other societal concerns.
- The party wants to add an 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to the United Nations’ SDGs, which are aims for all countries to meet by 2030 on issues including poverty, inequality, and climate change.
- The Synthetic Party now has only 11 signatures out of the 20,000 necessary to run in the November election.
The Synthetic Party, a new Danish political party with an artificially intelligent representative and AI-based policy, is targeting a seat in parliament and plans to run in the country’s general election in November.
How and why The Synthetic Party was established?
The artist collective Computer Lars and the non-profit art and technology organization MindFuture Foundation established the party in May. The public face and figurehead of the Synthetic Party is the AI chatbot Leader Lars, who has been trained on the policies of Danish fringe parties since 1970 and is designed to reflect the ideals of the 20% of Danes who do not vote in elections. Leader Lars will not appear on any ballots, but The Synthetic Party’s human members are dedicated to carrying out their AI-derived platform.
Asker Staunæs, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at MindFuture said, “We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat. So it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realize, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so.”
Leader Lars is an AI chatbot that may be contacted via Discord. Leader Lars can be addressed by opening your remarks with a “!” The AI understands English but responds in Danish.
“As people from Denmark, and also, people around the globe are interacting with the AI, they submit new perspectives and new textual information, where we collect in a dataset that will go into the fine-tuning. So that way, you are partly developing the AI every time you interact with it.” Staunæs added.
Goals of “Leader Lars”
The Synthetic Party’s aims include implementing a universal basic income of 100,000 Danish kroner per month, which is comparable to $13,700 and is more than double the Danish average wage. Another suggested policy shift is to establish a government-owned internet and IT industry on par with other public organizations.
Staunæs says, “It’s a synthetic party, so many of the policies can be contradictory to one another. Modern machine learning systems are not based on biological and symbolic rules of old-fashioned artificial intelligence, where you could uphold a principle of noncontradiction as you can in traditional logic. When you synthesize, it’s about amplifying certain tendencies and expressions within a large, large pool of opinions. And if it contradicts itself, maybe they could do so in an interesting way and expand our imagination about what is possible.”
The objective of the Synthetic Party is also to raise awareness about the significance of AI in our lives and how governments can hold AI responsible for biases and other societal factors. The party seeks to add an 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to the United Nations SDGs, which are targets for all nations to attain by 2030 on topics such as poverty, inequality, and climate change. The proposed SDG by the Synthetic Party is named Life With Artificials, and it focuses on the interaction between humans and AI, as well as how to adapt and train people to work with machines.
AI in a democracy
“AI has not been addressed properly within a democratic setting before, Staunæs explained. When it is discussed, it is in the framework of rules, but Staunæs believes that governments cannot possibly restrict the growth of technology. “So we try to change the theme to show that through artistic means and through humans curating them, artificial intelligence can actually be addressed within democracy and be held accountable for what it does and how it proceeds,” he added.
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Staunæs believes that AI is populist by default since it is frequently trained on enormous volumes of data or works of art generated by humans and collected from the internet. Even if it is populist, it is not yet democratic.
Staunæs also stated, “Artificial intelligence, in the form of machine learning, has already absorbed so much human input that we can say that in one way, everybody participates in these models through the data that they have submitted to the Internet. But the systems we have today are not encouraging more active participation, where people actually take control of their data and images, which we can in another way through this concentrated form that publicly available machine learning models offer.”
Staunæs differentiated The Synthetic Party from “fully ‘virtual’ politicians,” such as SAM from New Zealand and Alisa from Russia. Staunæs said that such candidates, who were AI-powered bots that voters could interact with “are anthropomorphizing the AI in order to act as an objective candidate, [so that] they become authoritarian. While we synthetics are in for full-on democratization of a ‘more-than-human’ way of life.” According to Staunæs, The Synthetic Party stresses investigating how humans may benefit from AI rather than having a dominant AI spokesperson.
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So far, The Synthetic Party has only 11 signatures out of the 20,000 required to compete in the November election. If the party were to enter parliament, Staunaes stated that AI would control policies and agendas, with humans functioning as interpreters of the program.
