The last months have generated rapid shifts for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. While AI itself is not new, the entry of ChatGPT has ushered in a wholly new wave of developments fueled by generative AI.
At HGL, we believe now is the moment to advance AI in politics. In our 2023 Investment Thesis, we state that:
“Generative artificial intelligence is exploding around the world, transforming industries in real-time and foreshadowing great potential for politics and campaigns. Trends also point to volunteer recruitment, cold voter contact, and fundraising becoming more expensive and less effective for campaigns. There is the potential to lower the cost of all of these critical functions by automating time-intensive functions, freeing up precious staff and volunteer time to do what they’re best at.”
There are many use cases of AI in politics. AI offers the possibility to not only automate time-intensive activities, but to augment the capacity of our best resource: our people.
If you’re new to AI, here’s where we recommend you begin. Start by simply having a chat with ChatGPT. As you get familiar with the tool and improve the phrasing of your questions (aka “prompts”), you’ll notice that there are many initiatives dedicated solely to improving ChatGPT prompts.
After experimenting with ChatGPT, it’s time to check out a comprehensive rundown of hundreds of new AI-technologies at The Rundown’s AI Supertools directory.
If you want to follow this rapidly evolving space, consider subscribing to Rowan Cheung’s Rundown newsletter or following them on Twitter. He’s one of hundreds of people surfacing the latest and greatest on a daily basis.
There is an almost-overwhelming amount of innovation taking place at an accelerating rate. The power of these technologies is clear once they are in use. We want to start surfacing technologies that may be advantageous and time-saving for campaigns and organizations. There are huge caveats here, including deep ethical and privacy questions when it comes to data in particular, and content creation at the point of indistinguishability. New norms and codes of conduct are yet to be created. But we cannot avoid this topic because of concerns. We must engage in advancing this in a way that works for progressive politics.
To help, there are many low-hanging fruits of AI that are simple ways to improve your workday. Below we’ve assembled a small sampling of some of the newest tools out there that can aid campaigns, lightly grouped by use case. Some are existing HGL portfolio companies that you may know well. Many others are new tools from the broader industry. Please note these have not been tested or fully assessed, but are shared for reference and experimentation with the understanding this is still a very early period of growth and many of these tools are early to market.
Watch this space for updates and new entrants into this rapidly-developing market. Things are evolving so rapidly that the content in this article may even be outdated by the time you read this post! Let us know what else should be added to this piece by tweeting at us or emailing info@highergroundlabs.com.
Media
Content Creation
| Fliki – Turn text into videos with AI voices. |
| Synesthesia – Turn text into videos in 60+ languages with avatars. |
| Paradiso – Text, voices, and videos with a human-like spokesperson (in multiple languages). |
| Revoldiv – AI-integrated* podcast platform with an integrated editing tool. *In the near future, this will be nearly impossible to distinguish from real podcasts. This is one to watch for misinformation risk. |
Message Development
| Swayable – Measure the impact of political messages and help campaigns optimize messaging strategies. HGL portfolio company |
| Grow Progress – Identifies which messages or content work best by running Rapid Message Tests. HGL portfolio company |
| INTRVL – Machine learning models for audience targeting and response analysis. HGL portfolio company |
Social Media
| Measure Studio – Content intelligence & analytics platform that uses AI to understand and optimize content performance. HGL portfolio company |
| SpeechifAI – Writing assistant for social media posts with sharing toolkits for supporters across all platforms. HGL portfolio company |
| Unitary – Context-aware AI to detect harmful content for human content moderators. HGL portfolio company |
Operations
Campaign Operations
| OpenField – Analytics and automated NLP (Natural Language Processing) helps organizers learn from conversations at scale. HGL portfolio company |
| SID – Ask SID a question and get the file, email or message that answers it from any of your applications.* *TBD on how it will perform with files named Listfinal.csv, or Listfinalfinalforreal.csv |
Volunteer Training
| Liveform – The easiest way to create and deploy intelligent agents to be used in volunteer management. A trainer could use LiveForm AI Agents to train volunteers or staff, as well as test knowledge of the material |
| Pragma – Streamlines customer messaging and knowledge. Volunteers can search your training center content/ knowledge base to quickly answer specific questions |
Research
| Avalanche – Uses Natural Language Processing to transform qualitative data into actionable insights. HGL portfolio company |
| Chat YouTube – Chat with any YouTube video from a simple URL. |
| Clipbook – Smart media intelligence delivers clips to your inbox. HGL portfolio company |
Data & Engineering
| AutoGPT – Creates AI “agents” that operate automatically on their own and complete tasks for you. It has internet access, long-term and short-term memory, access to popular websites, and file storage. Early adopters are using AutoGPT to create applications without needing to write a single line of code. Read more about AutoGPT on the Rundown. |
| CodeWhisperer – Amazon’s AI-powered coding assistant, another version of GitHub Copilot. It is free for any individual developer, which means every developer will have access to superhuman-like coding abilities using AI. |
| GitHub Copilot – It uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor. |
| LangChain – Can be used to help data managers explore a voter file with #GPT. Matt Hodges of Zinc Labs shared a useful LinkedIn post on this recently |
