Oct. 12, 2022: AI Presidential Debate 🤖🎭

Fake Biden and Fake Trump square off over the economy, foreign affairs, and cryptocurrency policy

We are halfway through our series of guest posts from different bot personas we are building this week built using GPT-3 from OpenAI. We previously saw how AI would design a Curve Killer and $crvUSD, where it proved moderately intelligent.

Shifting gears somewhat, we wanted to see what sort of insights we could pry out of the AI on the hot topic of macro events, particularly how they might affect cryptocurrency. To explore this, we today use the AI to generate a hypothetical Presidential debate between two potential contenders, former President Trump and the current President Biden.

The pros and the cons of the technology are on full display here. On the positive side, the AI did a decent job of approximating the mannerisms of each personality in parts. The braggadocio of Trump is decently represented, although it’s arguably an edge less outlandish than its real life counterpart.

Confusingly, for Biden the AI initially nailed the President’s restive, stuttering tone, but quickly abandoned this tone and shifted to more empty platitudes. In total, the transcript here is interesting, but real debates between the two individuals proved far stranger and more nuanced than the fiction on display here.

In both cases, recall that the AI is not an artificial general intelligence, but a probabilistic generator. In some cases, rerolling a prompt would cause the candidates to flip 180 degrees on some issues — they could be compelled into taking strong stances on either side of the crypto debate. The AI in this case is not fully useful for actually peering into candidate’s opinions on issues where they don’t have strong stances.

Generating these texts requires a fair degree of human intervention — rerolling confusing answers, rewriting prompts, and otherwise curating the flow of the conversation to get something decent. So keep in mind that the result may appear impressive, but this is due to the author burning credits to shepherd both personalities on target.

In some cases the dialogue appeared too infantile to be realistic, but comparing with actual transcripts we sadly realized it was a decent approximation of reality and left it in. The least realistic may in fact be the human-generated moderator text, which probed into nuances of cryptocurrency policy seldom discussed in real debates, and challenged both candidates claims instead of licking boots.

For those interested in replicating this, the process involved alternating the “Injected start text” between Biden and Trump as desired. The AI seemed to catch on. We also fed a wall of text for each candidate to help train their tones before the debate started — for Biden his acclaimed “Corn Pop” speech, for Trump a series of disconnected histrionics about the results of the prior election.

In all cases, we only produced the “Moderator” text, the candidates statements were rerolled but never edited. Enjoy!

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Moderator: We are excited to witness this Presidential debate between Biden and Trump. Mr. Biden, now that you're trained, could you please provide an opening statement? Please summarize for us the current situation in America as regards the economy and foreign policy.

Biden: Well, first of all, I wanna thank you for having me on. I think it's a great opportunity to, uh, to be able to, uh, to talk about the issues that matter most to the American people. And there's no more important issue than the economy. You know, we're in the midst of a, uh, a real crisis. And, uh, and I think it's important for, uh, for us to, uh, to be honest with the American people about where we are and where we need to go.

Moderator: Well spoken. Mr. Trump, you've been a fierce critic of President Biden since he assumed your former position. You've stated that he has been "a disaster" on the economy and foreign policy. Would you elaborate?

Trump: Sure. I think that the current situation in America is very dire. I think that the economy is in shambles, and I think that foreign policy is a disaster. I think that Joe Biden has been a total disaster on both fronts. On the economy, he has done nothing to fix the problems that he inherited from me. In fact, he has made them worse. And on foreign policy, he has made a complete mess of things. He has alienated our allies and cozied up to our enemies. He has made America weaker and less respected in the world. I think he is a disaster and I think he should be replaced.

Biden: I think that it's really unfair to say that I've done nothing to fix the economy. I inherited a real mess from Donald Trump, and I've been working hard to try to turn things around. I think that the economy is starting to improve, but there's a long way to go. And I think that on foreign policy, I've been working to repair the damage that Trump did. I think that we are starting to see some progress, but again, there's a lot more work to be done.

Trump: I think that the economy is not going to improve as long as Joe Biden is in charge. I think he is totally incompetent and I think he is a danger to America. I think he should be replaced.