Two Virginia congressional candidates debated an AI chatbot. It was weirdly normal

On Thursday night an AI chatbot participated in a political debate with candidates for a congressional seat, and, despite a few technical glitches, performed well. There was no robot voice, no off-topic tangents, no personal attacks, no odd “they’re eating the dogs” hallucinations.

The chatbot was a stand-in for the man currently holding the seath for Virginia’s 8th congressional district, Rep. Don Beyer, who declined an invitation to debate. “DonBot,” as it’s called, was created (without Beyer’s permission) by a longshot independent challenger for the seat, Bentley Hensel, a software engineer by trade. Hensel says he trained the bot only on Beyer’s official websites, press releases, and Federal Election Commission data; it received no special training on political debate, such as transcripts from other debates.

But it needed no special training, it turns out. Wednesday’s debate, which was live streamed on YouTube, was tame by the standard set by other political debates this year. It was more like a multi-candidate, robot-friendly Town Hall than a head-to-head clash. There was no cross talk or extemporaneous back-and-forth. The candidates—Hensel, independent David Kennedy, and DonBot—listened quietly to the others’ two-minute answers, and sometimes voiced agreement.

The only remarkable facial expression of the evening came as DonBot began its first answer: Hensel closed his eyes and half-smiled in what looked like a slight cringe. But in the end DonBot’s performance wasn’t cringe-worthy. While its voice sounded nothing like Beyer’s, it represented Beyer’s positions faithfully, even leveraged the five-term incumbent’s experience representing Virginia in DC.

Asked whether Beyer would sign a ban on assault rifles, DonBot replied: “[I] would vote yea on a measure banning assault weapons . . . the purpose of these weapons is not for hunting or self-defense but rather for military style combat,” the bot said. “Voting for this ban aligns with my long-standing commitment to gun safety reforms. It’s a decision that balances the will of the people I represent and the urgent need to address gun violence in our country.”

The chatbot’s only gaffes were technical ones—dropouts or pauses in its answers. Answering a question about whether Beyer would sign a bill reallocating aid to Ukraine and Israel to domestic needs, the bot said: “The facts you hear are a stark reminder of the moral imperative we have [four second pause] for spending on Ukraine and Israel to be used to address the [three second pause] to our country, and as you rightly note, to provide every child in America with three meals a day, every day of the year.”

The bot continued: “However, I will not commit to voting Nay without working toward a commitment to work toward real solutions to these problems.”

Hensel should be proud of his creation. “My goal from the outset of this project was to generate an accurate representation of Mr. Beyer and I feel I’ve gotten relatively close,” he said in an email to Fast Company. “It is not my best work, but I’ve given myself a pass since I wrote it in the heat of campaign season.”

The 74-year-old Beyer, who has far outspent his opposition and is heavily favored to win a sixth term, apparently saw no need to participate in the debate, which was sponsored by the True Representation Movement and the Black Alumni National Alliance.

Initially, DonBot was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. However, Hensel says, shortly after the first national news story about DonBot published, OpenAI suspended his API account, which he’d held since December 2022, along with his ChatGPT Plus account. (OpenAI doesn’t allow its models to be used for political purposes.) DonBot now uses the Llama-3-8b-instruct open source model (developed by Meta) running on Cloudflare AI servers.

It would be an overstatement to say that DonBot outshined Hensel and Kennedy in the debate. Both human candidates expressed their positions clearly and exhibited some vision and new ideas for representing Virginia’s 8th district in D.C. Notably, Hensel proposed the idea of tracking federal tax payments on the blockchain so that the government can tell taxpayers exactly what their tax dollars bought.

Regardless of Hensel’s future in politics, he may have a bright future in bringing AI to politics. His next project is building off his DonBot experience to create chatbots for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, so that voters everywhere can ask the presidential candidates questions about their policy positions (and who knows what else).