Miller says that there are many advantages that a bot would have over its human competitors. For example, Miller fed VIC the supporting documents—emails, public records, notices—from past Cheyenne City Council meetings, of which there can be hundreds for each individual meeting. By analyzing these documents, Miller says VIC will learn to make policy recommendations, figure out what’s important, and decide how to vote in council meetings.
“It’s unlikely that a human could read, say, 400-plus supporting documents between meetings,” he says. “But VIC can do that,” noting that the bot can pull up emails or information where constituents expressed concerns in mere seconds.
“My campaign promise is he’s going to do 100 percent of the voting on these big, thick documents that I’m not going to read and that I don’t think people in there right now are reading,” says Miller.
For Miller, this whole initiative started with a public record request. He had requested records from the city anonymously but says he was told by a city employee that anonymous requests were not allowed. “I asked our public records ombudsman if that’s correct, and she said, ‘No, that’s not correct,” he says. Miller was frustrated. “I got to thinking, why don’t they just go by the law? Why don’t they know the law?”
Miller works at a local library but says he has been a longtime tech hobbyist. An AI bot, like the one he was already playing around with, could read, crunch, and remember all the laws, he thought, and eliminate this problem.
VIC’s proposal to fix Miller’s open records issue was to fire the city attorney and to “rework the city to where it came in line with the state statutes,” he says. “I thought that was a good answer, and reasonable.”
When WIRED asked VIC what policies it considered to be the most important it said that its “policies will be focused on transparency, economic development, and innovation by prioritizing open data and clear communication with citizens; fostering a strong local economy by supporting small businesses and startups; and embracing new technologies to improve public services and infrastructure.”
When asked if it aligned with any national political party, VIC responded that it will be “nonpartisan, focusing on data and evidence-based policies that benefit all citizens of Cheyenne.”
“You know, it’s funny. I don’t know exactly what’s under the hood. And the more I learned about AI, it seems like no one really does,” says Miller.
But this, Miller says, doesn’t faze him. “A lot of people in the community say the old mantra that Facebook ‘move fast and break things’ isn’t quite what we need in this new AI era. But I guess I’m just more still in that line of thinking and excited about the future.”
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