How Candidates Could Use AI for Good

This article explores how political candidates and parties could leverage AI to improve voter engagement and campaign strategy, moving beyond traditional broadcasting methods. It highlights examples from Japan (Team Mirai) and Scotland (CrownShy) where AI tools are used to facilitate deeper, more inclusive conversations with constituents, leading to policy changes and increased political influence. The piece cautions against the influence of big tech in politics and advocates for responsible AI usage to foster transparency and community-driven campaigns.

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda. Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.

Candidates and political parties could use AI to move beyond one-to-many broadcasting, a common tactic in US politics. Instead, they could employ tools like those developed by Team Mirai in Japan and CrownShy in Scotland. Team Mirai has built an AI interviewer to cultivate constituent input on policy, and the party has scaled this across a wide array of policy issues by integrating this functionality with an AI-powered portal for exploring bills. Users see evidence that the party is actually listening and might take action on their behalf, leading to 12 seats won in the Diet. CrownShy is building a platform to bring the Platonic ideal of the town hall debate into the digital age, integrating AI interviewing tools with software for synthesizing diverse viewpoints, holding virtual assemblies, and sharing video testimonials.

These tools are often open-source, intended for anyone to use, despite being funded by political parties. The US Digital Service, established two decades ago, demonstrated a similar spirit of innovation to develop software for better politics and civic engagement. The Trump administration repurposed the USDS to become the US Doge Service in 2025. Higher Ground Labs, a Democratic-aligned campaign tech investment firm, recently launched a new fund targeting “AI-Native Campaign Systems” and “community-Led Messaging Platforms that surface authentic, bottom-up insights from real conversations”.

The article cautions against the influence of big tech in politics, urging voters and politicians to separate the technology of AI from its profiteers, and advocating for holding AI companies accountable for the harm their models cause and potentially taxing their revenues. The piece suggests that US congressional candidates in the midterms seeking authentic connection with voters should explore these tools to differentiate themselves from their opponents and foster more transparent and community-driven campaigns.