Pemilu.AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Electoral Politics

Jakarta, Indonesia - In every election season, candidates vying for political office naturally seek to create a winning strategy for their campaigns. For the vast majority of election seasons, the creation of this winning strategy requires among other things the formation of volunteer groups, reliance on polling organisations to find support bases, and tedious internal polling systems operated by each campaign. Needless to say, this process requires a whole lot of manpower. However, as we enter a new era where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to be used even for the production of musical pieces, the creation of a new platform by businessman Mr. Yose Rizal aptly named Pemilu.AI may set a new precedent for how candidates conduct campaign strategy starting in the 2024 election and for years to come.

“(Pemilu.AI) is a platform (for) communication using machine learning and generative AI to capture all the data from the candidate (of an election) itself and the constituents.” Mr. Rizal told the Brawijaya Times in an exclusive interview. (21/08/23)

The technology used by Pemilu.AI is certainly novel, being the first in the entire world to employ machine learning for the purposes of political campaigning. Through Pemilu.AI, a political candidate can get access to important information such as the amount of support they have in a certain district, winning issues they could bring attention to in a certain district, even down to the production of social media hashtags and speech transcripts which can be politically advantageous for a candidate.

“We do the computations which results in a personalised and micro-targeted campaign using the latest generative AI technology”, Mr. Rizal said.

To utilise Pemilu.AI, a candidate has to pay a starting fee dependent on what level of elections they participate in.

“For Kabupaten (regency) candidates, we start from only 29 million Rupiah, for provincial candidates, (the fee) is 99 million Rupiah, and for national legislative (elections, the fee) is 149 million (Rupiah).” Mr. Rizal said.

After the payment, the candidate can use Pemilu.AI for the entirety of the election season. To craft the strategy for each candidate, Pemilu.AI takes into consideration each candidate’s personal brand and how to effectively utilise them in light of important issues that the candidate could talk about.

“All the candidates have their own branding, be it (being) religious, brave(ry), (their) nationalism, (or their) charity. We use that personal branding and combine (it) with all the issues that (are) critical to their constituents, (which can be made) as a speech, as a slogan, or even a social media caption.”

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more developed, the technology utilised in Pemilu.AI would be very significant for the future of electoral politics and indeed even the very future of lawmaking for years to come.

“We believe that Pemilu.AI will change the way leaders and politicians (represent) their constituents and understand the problem (of their constituencies). We want to make sure that this (Pemilu.AI) will be the foundation for (the concept) of what we call a ‘Smart Government’, when all the decisions and all the regulations that the government (enacts) are based on data information that could be (gathered) real time.” Said Mr. Rizal.

“We have so (much) data, the problem is (that) because it’s so big, sometimes it’s not easy to see the pattern, the problem, and the potential (steps that could be taken for) growth (from the problem.) With machine learning and generative AI, we want to help the decision makers to always make decisions based on (real time) data information.” Added Mr. Rizal.

As the first of its kind, it is possible that Pemilu.AI will eventually become the forefront for a new era of data processing brought about by machine learning and generative AI. Pemilu.AI’s creation also sheds light on the increasing utility of Artificial Intelligence in the field of governance and politics.

This newsletter was extracted from an interview with Mr. Yose Rizal, Commissioner in Telkomsel, CEO of Mediawave, CEO of PoliticalWave, and Co-Founder of Pemilu.AI.

For the full transcript, click here: link

All quotations are directly translated from Indonesian to English.

Image source: Kompas.id