The aim of the Wahl-o-Mat is to give voters a better overview of the parties’ positions. The Wahlweise Offer wants to go one step further: With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), the offer should not only include specific questions Related posts from election programs to answer, but also to compare their positions with the programmes of the elected parties.
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“We come from Thuringia ourselves and thought we would use artificial intelligence to get an overview,” says Martin Scheele, one of the initiators and CEO of the Thuringian AI company AIUI. Unlike the Wahl-o-Mat of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the answer comes directly from the parties’ election programs. “We initially focused on the Wahl-o-Mat questions, but we did not always find a concrete answer to them in the programs,” explains Scheele. The answers in the Wahl-o-Mat come directly from the parties, but are not necessarily reflected in the election program. Instead, the teams that develop the questions are thematically based on the election programs.
Optionally offers a chat for specific questions about election events or a quiz to compare your views with the parties.
(Image: Screenshot: wahlweise.info)
AI sorts election program fragments into questions
The model is based on Llama 3 and works with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): the AI selects excerpts from the election program from the database that match the question asked as closely as possible. The team did not need training data for this. The advantage of dividing the election programs into thematic fragments is that the person asking the question receives answers that match the content, but at the same time the fragments are short enough that the AI does not forget anything when summarizing them – which can of course happen with longer texts. “We did a lot of testing and improved the prompt with sixty to seventy iterations so that both the answers were correct and the AI did only what it was supposed to do: output information from the election programs,” Sheeley emphasizes. “The AI also provides a specific source where you can read the statements.”
Schiele says the AI reproduces excerpts from party programs. The goal: statements were formulated as neutrally as possible. The AI itself should not be biased. This was important to the team, Schiele stresses. Studies have shown that artificial intelligence can develop its own political predispositions through training material. “To remove this bias, we have anonymized the programs.” The AI can no longer specify which statement belongs to which party, but instead assigns it to a nickname. In the quiz, the person in front of the screen does not know which statement belongs to which party. “We really wanted to make it possible to assign content without bias to either side,” says Schiele.
Live information on election schedules
Schiele and his team alternately funded it from their own resources – as did partner companies through which hardware or testing was done. “Of course it’s marketing for us as well, but we mainly wanted to make this tool available to others as well.”
Dealing with the political agenda of parties using Wahlweise-AI, for example, requires much more reading concentration than with Wahl-o-mat. The texts are long and no direct comparison can be made – unless users ask the same question several times if they have selected different parties. Not all parties are represented either: a three-page flyer, for example, might not provide enough information on all questions. The team also wants to use the tool to motivate young people to get involved with the political views of parties. “The main thing we are trying to get young people to do is to ask them to talk nonsense out of our AI,” says Schiele. It is not possible to create a completely secure system that produces no errors.
Schiele is convinced that AI assistance will play an increasingly important role in political education. “We will no longer do many things like research: in three to five years, an AI assistant will do this for us,” he suspects. “Then the question becomes: who are the gatekeepers to what the system has to offer?”
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