Elections – a crucial turning point in the life cycle of any government. The point where the fate of the present government is decided along with that of the millions of people who voted it and brought it to power. But, before the actual D-Day (voting day), the festivities (campaigning) begin months in advance—the hullabaloo of parties contesting each other through various media – print hoardings, television channels, social media platforms, and even loudspeaker rallies.
This entire campaigning process involves huge monetary expenditure, not to mention, the arduous effort of innumerable party workers for days at a stretch, even months. Now, what if something can considerably reduce the time, effort and money spent on political campaigns and still yield effective results?
AI – The Future Of Political Campaigning
With the revolutionary technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) slowly but steadily seeping through various domains, it may not be too early to say that it can play a vital role in shaping the future of politics as well. What has politics got to do with AI though, one might wonder? Well, here’s a short glimpse into what potential does this 21St-century technology hold for our age-old political playfield.
Effective information dissemination – Political campaigns can sometimes go overboard with promotion, talking about things that may or may not interest an individual voter, making promises in areas not relevant to a specific group of people. This is where AI can help. By gauging the interests of individuals via their expressions on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, AI-driven machine-learning algorithms can help people designing the campaigns include more information on such topics that interest a particular group.
Example: If a person is more interested in the environment (as is evident from his tweets and posts, an AI-driven tool can be used to help him know what each political party thinks/intends to do about conserving the environment. The political campaigns of various parties can be customized to be palatable to individual tastes and interests.
Micro-target voter groups: Political campaigns are undoubtedly a huge affair; promoting each party in literally every remotest part of the country is no small deal. To make the whole exercise more effective, AI can be of great use in collecting large chunks of data online on general public mood, voter behaviour, party preferences, development needs, etc., and then processing it to understand the needs and demands of a specific voter group in a specific area/locality. This data can then be used by party campaigns to micro-target their voter audience groups, serving them exactly what they need on a silver platter.
Note: Data collection and processing during elections is not a novel concept. It has been in existence for decades. But AI can help bring efficiency in the entire process by significantly reducing the amount of time, effort, labour, and cost involved through automation (enabled by machine-learning algorithms).
Individual voter engagement: Election is not just about the party in power and the party that intends to come into power. It is most important, and rightly so, about the voters – the people who bring a particular party to power. As such, it becomes all the more necessary to have a sort of direct communication/interaction, if possible, with the voter to assess how they feel about the current government and what according to them are its flaws and plus points, etc. Now, it may not be practically possible to reach every individual voter sitting in their homes through political campaigning carried out at rallies.
AI can be effectively used here to engage the voters on an individual level during the entire election process. Chatbots and discussion forums on social media platforms encouraging people to leave comments/feedback/brickbats at the end are all various ways in which the public mood can be gauged. Moreover, AI can help collect all this data in real time and enable party campaigners to alter their campaigns accordingly, depending on what the public feels about them.
Prevent spreading of fake/false information: A common occurrence in political campaigning wherein contesting parties may engage in maligning their opponent, consciously or unconsciously. Also, owing to the fiery election mood that everybody is in, certain individuals tend to indulge in spreading fake rumours about a party/contestant through wrongly-intended tweets and social posts. AI-driven tools can help put a check on this practice to a large extent by keeping a real-time tab on what people are posting, collecting and compiling that data, and sending notification alerts to the concerned person to stop doing so. In addition, the concerned regulatory authorities can be informed of the same.
Reduce expenditure: Since AI can literally automate all tasks, even reducing the need for a human to be physically present (as can be seen with chatbots), the humungous amount of labour involved in allocating people for various tasks during the election process can be reduced to almost half, even lesser. This indirectly means lower expenditure that political parties have to incur while hiring staff and paying them to do all these tasks. With AI, political campaigning can turn into an effective and economic activity, thereby conserving the country’s precious financial resources.
Political campaigning is here to stay. Elections are nothing less than a festival in a country with varying emotions at play. Huge sums of money are lavishly disbursed by all parties to make sure that their campaign does not fall short of a single thing that may lead them to victory. With AI seen as the prospective future of political campaigns, all this could be channelized in better ways and in useful directions.