Desantis LLM Covered By Politico

My post about the weird LLM bot from the DeSantis campaign got a link from a Politico story today.

It did reveal a little more info that I thought was interesting. This was a PAC texting me, not the DeSantis campaign. It was mostly impossible to know that, but considering how politics works these days, I’m not surprised.

It was also mentioned that the campaign has to pay people to send the messages manually, per some FCC or campaign laws. That’s really interesting to me because it means someone was physically clicking a button when I was chatting with the bot, although it sounds like OpenAI was doing the actual composing of the messages.

Last but not least, it was interesting that I found out about this Politico article because a journalist (unaffiliated with Politico) who was interested in writing about what happened but wasn’t 100% sure I was telling the truth let me know about it. Thanks for backing me up, Politico!