Could it be true?
Every day between now and the election, Tortoise's Alexi Mostrous will examine a claim from the campaign trail. Some will be outlandish, some believable. Some might even be true.
Voters in Brighton next month will be able to choose from seven real parliamentary candidates and one virtual one. AI Steve, an independent, is perhaps the first artificially generated politician to stand for parliament. According to its website, AI Steve’s policies include cutting university fees by 50 per cent and introducing a tax on Google and online retailers. Read more closely, however, and you’ll see that AI Steve is an algorithmic manifestation of Rochdale-based entrepreneur Steve Endacott. Endacott, who has a house in Brighton, says that if elected he’ll go to parliament to vote for policies advocated by his AI doppelganger. It’s unclear how this would work in practice. It’s also not a coincidence that Endacott is chairman of an AI company called Neural Voice, whose technology powers AI Steve.
