‘All Politics is Local’ is an opinion column written by John Lyons, a member of West Hartford’s Democratic Town Committee.

By John Lyons

Each month I examine national issues and offer my thoughts on how West Hartford (and we as residents) are impacted. You’ll be surprised at how much seemingly small, or out-of-sight issues have a big impact on all of us.

I am over 40 years old. OK, let me be honest, I am WELL OVER 40 years old! For anyone who is close to 40 years old (or older), you likely remember the early days of the internet with “good” computers having an internal model for dial up service and every time you wanted to go to a website or check your email, you would wait for the preliminary dial-up, screech and connection of the of the modem to your internet service provider (most used AOL or Yahoo) and everything was quite rudimentary (featured image courtesy of Wayback Machine).

There was no Wi-Fi. There was no Bluetooth. There were predominantly dial-up models with only the newest and best-equipped homes and offices having access to hard-wired access to the internet. It was, in many ways, the dawn of this era. While the internet had been around for nearly 30 years at that point with origins traced back to the 1960s, for the average person, accessibility, scale and affordability only came into alignment in the 1990s.

Same goes for artificial intelligence. While the earliest use of AI traces its roots to a checkers match in 1952, large scale commercial use didn’t really get going until around 2010 when Apple integrated it into the iPhone (Siri), IBM with “Watson,” and eventually “Alexa” soon to follow, and further widespread consumer use only became readily available in 2018.

While the consumer benefited from those advancements, AI was more passive and less comprehensive until June 2018 when ChatGPT-1 launched with its Open AI network. ChatGPT-1 was a game changer in the AI space allowing anyone to create using this free service. News stories abounded about students using ChatGPT to complete term papers and schools have had to introduce sophisticated processes to combat the practice.

There have been further releases since with more and more parameters being added and AI getting smarter and smarter by the week, but I suspect we are still in its literal infancy. Just as dial-up modems and slow connection speeds were de rigueur in 1997, most people who are not in the tech universe have only seen text versions of AI or use in creating imagery that is often very flawed.

I can only imagine where AI will be in 20 years and I hope I am still around to see it.

What does AI have to do with politics? Sadly it seems that for now, AI is used seemingly for nefarious reasons with shadowy PACS as an example using it to create false images of candidates to make them look bad – false stories written and planted to try to help their candidate. Foreign governments have also attempted interference with use of AI being a part of those efforts. Recently, several right-wing commentators were discovered to have unknowing been duped by overseas influencers into reporting and posting things to their millions of social media followers that were untrue and intended to influence the election, “useful idiots” as the old saying goes.

While it amplifies the point that non-experts who have somehow amassed millions of followers shouldn’t comment on topics they know nothing about, it doesn’t stop them from doing so. We’ve seen them become infectious disease experts, economics experts, stock market experts, weather experts, fill-in-the-blank experts … all to build followers and engage their audience, and all while knowing little to nothing about the topic. Add to this the “drive-by” nature of political campaigns and we have a recipe for massive misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Maybe there is where AI can come in as a force for good. AI can be implemented to act on its own and utilizing it on social media in the background could stop influencers from disseminating misinformation. Take Springfield, Ohio for instance. JD Vance created the story of “‘Illegal’ Haitian immigrants” eating their neighbors’ cats. (The story traces its roots to a tragic accident a year ago where a Haitian immigrant crashed with a school bus on the first day of school killing one child and injuring several others.) The broken-hearted father of the child who lost his life has repeatedly said that this was an accident. JD Vance continues to call the accident a “murder” at rallies and on media appearances.

Many things are wrong with his claims: While Vance later admitted to “creating” the cats and dogs story, former President Trump repeated the story ostensibly as fact to an audience of 67 million viewers in a televised debate and then finally prominent Republicans and right-wing influencers parroted the story on social media exposing it to tens of even hundreds of millions more around the world and among many other things, making America look as foolish as it ever has.

Vance continues to call the immigrants “illegals” even though they are legally here, eligible to work, and are working hard improving their community’s economy. He also continues to call the accident a “murder.”

The fallout: Springfield, Ohio (which is like countless other towns in the USA), has had their community upended with threats to community leadership and schools, an infusion of national media, talk of a Trump rally which would bring in thousands of people from out of town, which the mayor and town manager have begged the campaign to not do. Finally, the relations between the longer tenured residents and the newer Haitian residents is fractured and wounded. The national attention is doing nothing to help and frankly, many of the outsiders watching want to do nothing to resolve it.

Could AI have helped prevent this? While maybe only the old-fashioned seven-second delay and bleep button could have stopped Trump from claiming “[Haitians] are eating the cats [and] the dogs…of the people of Springfield,” and David Muir did fact check it immediately, the Vance comments are much more concerning because he admitted to creating the story and now keeps doubling down on it. This is where I hope one of the roles of AI can help. The echoing and reposting of the claim by Vance could be fact-checked instantly with currently available AI technology. Just as “Community Notes” works, AI can do it faster, more thoroughly, without bias and in the vast majority of the cases, more accurately as well.

JD Vance has proven over the last few weeks he cares nothing for the town of Springfield (which are his current constituents by the way), only about the political points he can score using that town as a backdrop. AI can be a powerful answer to stopping the spread of lies and I think it should be used. He appears to lack the character to care in this instance. But the “drive-by” opportunities are too great for him to resist! There must be guardrails and people in the media and who have the large audiences of followers need to stay within them. AI offers one solution. The social media companies have the technology to implement it today.

My final point: What happens in Springfield, Ohio, can happen in West Hartford or any other community and we all need to respect this fact. Character, common decency, respecting guardrails, and a proper application of AI can help protect future communities from what Springfield has gone through.

The views expressed represent the opinion of John Lyons, and are not intended to represent the opinion of We-Ha.com or the West Hartford Democratic Town Committee.

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