It’s 3 am. You can’t sleep. You’re tossing and turning because you simply must speak to your MP to ask them what their favourite crisp flavour is. Or if they’d be up for reintroducing the death penalty. Or how they feel about the many pointless uses of AI that are being foisted upon us.
Good news! Your MP might be asleep, but an unnerving homunculus pretending to be Mark Sewards, MP for Leeds South West and Morley, will be happy to help. Well, “help” is a strong word. Much like a real politician, AI Mark will really just give you the runaround.
Sewards unveiled his AI doppelganger yesterday, saying that the “AI revolution is happening and we must embrace it to see how it can be useful, in all sectors”. I could have saved him some time: it’s not useful.
In follow-up posts on social media, Sewards explained that the “prototype AI model offers my constituents an additional way to engage with their MP on local casework and policy issues”. But when I tried to ask the unhelpful digital clone about the real Mark Sewards’ views on AI, the very thing he’s so keen to embrace, it refused to give me a single scrap of information.
The one thing AI Mark was willing to tell me is that Mark Sewards was invested in securing more funding for state education. Which, you know, you’d hope from a Labour MP. OK, I thought, I’ll ask it for the MP’s views on education. An easy one. Something he cares about. Again, though, it refused to tell me anything.
He also wouldn’t answer my question about whether a potato would be more helpful. AI Mark is no fun at all.
Really, AI Mark is simply a gussied up data collection tool, passing on questions and complaints to Sewards’ team. Like an email inbox. An expensive email inbox with a pretty dodgy privacy policy.
This policy allows Neural Voice, the AI company behind AI Mark, to retain your personal information for as long as is deemed necessary by Neural Voice. Since retaining all your information could arguably help train its AI model, it could just keep it forever, without even anonymising the data. Cool.
If this sounds slightly familiar, it’s because Neural Voice previously developed a creepy AI chatbot that it hoped would have a career in politics. AI Steve. “This is democracy reinvented,” it said. It isn’t, of course. It’s just more data collection.
Standing as an independent candidate, AI Steve created policies based on what it discussed with anyone with enough free time to waste their day chatting to it, which would have been relayed to Parliament by a flesh-and-blood proxy. 179 jokers voted for AI Steve, placing it dead last. But at least it was able to hoover up lots of data to the benefit of wealthy entrepreneur Steve Endacott—the real Steve.
Ultimately this glorified chatbot just benefits an AI company rather than UK voters, and its vocal detractors are understandably concerned about politicians telling people that we need to “embrace” AI. There are absolutely positive use cases for AI, but it’s also had a devastating impact on education, and it’s ushered in a troubling new era of disinformation and plagiarism.
What does Mark Sewards think about that? I don’t know. AI Mark wouldn’t tell me.