Nancy Pelosi rages at ‘sexist and racist’ AI chatbot mocking her would-be successor

A parody artificial intelligence chatbot launched by a candidate trying to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress was taken down Friday after the former House speaker attacked the bot for being “sexist.”

California state Sen. Scott Wiener launched the chatbot this week to mock fellow Democrat and city supervisor Connie Chan, who earned Pelosi’s endorsement. Wiener and Chan will face against each other in November for Pelosi’s seat.

The website ConnieChan.ai bills itself as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask,” a knock on Chan’s reputation among critics as a progressive NIMBY who has opposed numerous housing proposals.

The Chan campaign unsurprisingly was not a fan of Wiener’s unique campaigning tactic. Pelosi then stepped in to echo her own fury over the tactic.

“Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power. We should not have to now fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths,” Pelosi said Thursday, releasing a long statement with the backing of numerous female elected officials.

The statement accuses Wiener for using AI to impersonate a female voice, which is a “gross misuse of technology and reflects a disturbing willingness to erase women’s agency.” It further claimed that because Chan is a non-white woman, such harms “compound with racial stereotypes.”

Wiener initially shot back at Pelosi’s cries of sexism, noting his campaign clearly labeled the chatbot as parody. He called out the former speaker for having opposed his first-in-the-nation AI safety law and said her claims were “baseless.”

“This is classic deflection,” he said of the attacks on the chatbot, which he insisted accurately describes Chan’s problems as a candidate.

However, Wiener ultimately decided to take the chatbot down, insisting it had only become a distraction.

“Our use of an AI chatbot clearly missed the mark. The conversation became about the tactic instead of the issues that actually matter to San Franciscans,” the state senator said in a statement.

Wiener and Pelosi have reportedly had a tense relationship ever since the state senator made it clear he’s been long eyeing her seat, even before she announced she would retire.

Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan, despite Wiener’s frontrunner status in the primary, was seen as a sign of that rebuke.

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