How Artificial Intelligence In Politics Can Prove To Be A Game Changer

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a simulation of human intelligence in machines with the help of algorithms that are programmed to think like humans and perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence. AI systems demonstrate some of the behaviors similar to human intelligence, such as learning, planning, and reasoning.

AI consists of neural networks that are interconnected layers of algorithms called neurons, which is a set of inputs, a set of weights, and an activation function trained to carry out specific tasks by changing the importance credited to the input data while it passes between the layers.

While these neural networks are trained, the weights attached to different inputs will continue to be varied until the output of the neural network is very close to what is desired. This is the point where it is considered that the AI program has learned to carry out a particular task.

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Machine learning is a feature of AI. When you need to make sense of huge volumes of data, it might become difficult to decide where to begin to look for interesting trends, and we may start exploring the data by using machine learning technology to perform this task. It empowers computers to employ a self-learning mode without being programmed.

With the help of training and use of algorithms to parse data to make a prediction about something. For example, analysing past voting patterns with the increase or decrease in the candidates' popularity and a few other factors such as first time voter preference and their population ratio along with their percentage of participation to predict vote share in the current given situation for the candidate or the party.

AI has headed towards replacing humans in many facets of life, from performing assisted surgeries to self driven cars, and many more. It has become critical for organizations that wish to automate and optimize processes to generate actionable insights.

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Use of AI in politics is not untouched, there seems to be a wide variety of avenues for AI¡¯s implementation into politics. From setting algorithms to target certain sections of voters on the basis of their internet activity to creating custom greetings for automated calls and use of chatbots to interact with their supporters.

During the presidential elections in Russia in 2018, a candidate, "Alice", contested the election. Slogans of her campaign were like, "the president who knows you best", resulted in getting her a couple thousand votes.

In India during the Lok Sabha election, the Prime Minister Modi used a hologram of himself to do virtual rallies at several places targeting different sets of people simultaneously. Political parties and candidates all over the world have now started using social media channels to target different groups of voters with different messaging.

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Big Data which is used for generating patterns, trends, and association for the extremely large data, over the last couple of years has gained significant momentum, the experiment of big data has already begun in politics. It has become crucial for political parties to devise their election strategy to micro-target voters and build communication plans accordingly. In 2012 President Obama's campaign used big data for micro targeting by identifying the interests of individual voters.

In India, use of digital media to influence voters geared up soon after the 2012 US election campaign and surpassed many benchmarks. Big Data played a vital role in 2014 and 2019 General election for the sweeping victory of BJP. With this, BJP managed to identify and engage with the undecided voters, beneficiaries of government schemes like Ujjwala. Many political parties have now employed machine learning experts to carry out sentiment analysis by crawling tweets through Natural Language Processing by assigning a mood label (joy, sadness, neutral, anger etc.) these complex techniques helps them evaluate the overall mood of social media users on any trending social and political issues. They are also using these technologies for future vote predictions by analysing past voting patterns.

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A digital platform empowered by Big Data dubbed as Project Shakti was launched by the Congress Party in July 2018 to link every Congress worker with the party president. Not just the Congress and the BJP but also smaller players like the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have leveraged technology to identify strong and swing booths for better optimization of the resources, leading to an extremely high vote share as an incumbent in Delhi Assembly Election 2020.

Due to Coronavirus outbreak and rules of social distancing in the current situation, politicians are left with no choice but to leverage technology to a great extent and design their campaign accordingly to communicate with their voters ensuring social distancing. Soon after Amit Shah's virtual rally in June for Bihar assembly election, to be held later this year. All other political parties, including JD (U), RJD have gone virtual by launching several digital initiatives. JD (U) has ramped up their presence on social media through Tuesday Talk, Virtual Sammelan to focus on the first-time voters. While leaders from RJD including former health minister of Bihar Tej Pratap Yadav doing zoom meetings with his party workers and supporters.

The increasing use of technology in the political sphere has so far managed to gain citizens¡¯ trust, but few new emerging technologies may weaponize false information, for instance a fake video that pretended to show former President Barack Obama insulting President Donald Trump created by a comedian Jordan Peele through deepfake technology which gained widespread attention in April 2018. Such technology may sow new seeds of distrust in the technology-driven campaigns.

About the author: Rizwan Shaikh is a technologist, data science expert and a certified machine learning professional from Harvard University. He presently leads tech and digital initiatives at the Population Foundation of India. Views expressed are author's alone.