Imagine that a city council runoff candidate came up to you asking for your vote. Say you asked a question, but the candidate’s response was to type it into ChatGPT and read the answer to you, while looking down.
Would you vote for that candidate?
No. Rather you would think, "What’s going on here?”
Artificial Intelligence is a brand new technology but Americans are already sick of the cheating and the fakery.
A mayoral candidate in Wyoming suggested turning local government over to an AI chatbot … and got only 2% of the vote. Politicians are using ChatGPT to write their speeches, with absurd results (including British MPs all sounding like Americans).
The idea of an “AI Candidate” does not yet have a face to go with it in popular consciousness.
Vivek Ramaswamy was mocked online as the AI candidate in 2024; however, it was because his answers were too scripted and fluid.
A candidate who was the opposite, who literally has nothing to say apart from ChatGPT would be a new one. To actually elect a candidate like this would be to invite mockery, and to deserve it.
Well, guess what? Irving is on the verge of doing just that:
This was the very first question in the April candidate forum. The question was, “introduce yourself and tell why you’re running.” Irving City Council District 3 candidate Kejal Patel could not answer it.
She is a deer in headlights. She does not seem to be having a good time campaigning. She would likely not enjoy serving on our city council.
And how could she even serve, without the language skills to understand what is going on, or the ability to effectively express herself?
The times when she is not reading answers, she says things like
“My story is rotating hard work and deeply commitment”
or
“We need safety neighborhoods with the childrens and the seniors always.”
However, when looking down and reading, Patel’s answers are in flawless English.
The safe bet is that the answers she’s giving in these cases are written by AI.
No mention here that her daughter goes to Coppell ISD,
even though she pays Irving ISD property taxes
Was she being fed AI answers at the candidate forum?
Yes, she was. After a question would be asked, a person in the audience would prompt an AI tool and copy-and-paste the answer into a note shared with her phone.
She would then read it into the mic.
Take the answer she gave above, for instance:
Don’t believe the AI checkers with their false positives; read her answer yourself. Is this her voice, or is it AI:
I think we can support educational programs by collaborating on after school initiatives, libraries, and community centers that give students safe spaces to learn and grow beyond the classroom.
We should have a collaboration and work together with the school board, and we should actively work with local businesses to create mentorship, internship, and career pathways so students are prepared for real world opportunities right here in our city.
Whether or not it’s AI-generated, it certainly differs from the one sentence of Patel’s when she broke off reading, looked up, and spoke straight to the audience:
“I think the stronger schools bring the most stronger communities.”
When Patel is looking up, she talks very differently from when she is reading.
For example, when asked for her biggest priority, she is looking up:
However, when she just looks down and reads, she sounds like AI.
This is even to the point where, in a direct question about conservation, she pronounced that word in her answer as “conversation”:
One more example:
Kejal Patel was the only city council candidate to not do an interview with us. It is obvious why she didn’t. She has no answers of her own.
After the Dallas Morning News met with her, they wrote a whole article praising the incumbent and the other challenger in the race, but had only one sentence to say about her at the end:
Obviously, this whole matter is painful.
Unqualified candidates run for office all the time, though, and even get elected. That’s our republican system of government. We survive.
However such events are normally upsets and should be wacky upsets. This is different. This is the rallying of the whole Irving establishment behind the candidacy of someone who could turn us into a laughingstock as electing the first ChatGPT public official in the country. This is not funny.
We are the 12th biggest city in Texas and a top-100 city in the United States of America. We deserve better than what our establishment is giving us.
At least the Dallas establishment did not back Amber Givens.
What is going on here?
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