With the stark advances and public release of generative Artificial Intelligence, political campaigns across the country are being indelibly altered.
Able to create customized content at the touch of a button, and push it out through a multitude of precisely segmented channels, political operatives — especially fundraisers — have been given a truly golden campaign tool.
[NOTE: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, running for President, just launched an A.I. bot of himself, an innovation he claims as “historic.”]
A.I. based on LLMs, or large language models, is one of the most powerful — and potentially dangerous — technologies on earth. Politicians use it to mine galactic levels of data and return language and context that acutely targets voters in every demographic segment, zeroing in on their hopes, their anger, their resentment, their beliefs — on every animating trigger in the electorate.
Yet even armed with the computing power of ten thousand spaceships, still no A.I. iteration — so far — has been able to create the kind of actionable targeted content that former President Donald Trump creates merely with his vituperative thumbs and his CapsLock key.
As U.S. Representative Adam Schiff has learned, Trump’s indefatigable insult machine is (as perhaps Trump would wish, given his favorite decor flourishes) more golden than even the golden tool of A.I.
Schiff has been capitalizing, literally, on Trump’s golden insults – a form of hitcoin — and turning the tool into a powerful weapon to attack his detractors and raise millions of dollars for his Senate run. The California Congressman, who asserts that being Trump’s enemy is a badge of honor, has been quoting Trump consistently in new fundraising emails.
Below is Schiff writing “Trump is threatening me on Truth Social (again)” — and then using Trump’s characterization of Schiff as a “treasonous SleazeBag” to activate donors.
It’s a technique, slightly varied, that Schiff takes right out of the Trump playbook — Trump raises huge sums every time he claims he is being freshly victimized by an allegedly unfair legal persecution.
To my Republican colleagues who introduced this sham resolution: You honor me with your enmity.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 21, 2023
You flatter me with this falsehood.
Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy, and I am grateful. pic.twitter.com/ATVFDLaUYT
Having raised a campaign war chest in the wake of being censured by his GOP colleagues in the House, Schiff has turned from Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s insults to Trump’s namecalling in his fundraising pitches.
Each time Trump — like A.I. on steroids — insults Schiff, the Congressman lets his people know and they send money. Lots of it. Schiff raised more than $8 million in the second quarter of this year alone.
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