In early August, the Scott Wiener for Congress campaign released a "parody chatbot" of his opponent Connie Chan, developed using Claude, an AI product developed by Anthropic, a massive private San Francisco company which has donated some $500,000 to Wiener's campaign. Scott Wiener - who promotes himself as a leader on AI regulation - thought this was a good idea, promoting the chatbot on his social media and purchasing billboards in Connie Chan's district announcing the chatbot's launch.
“We created ConnieChan.ai to lean into the AI craze overtaking the city and creatively reach voters with a product that stands out," a Wiener campaign spokesperson said on the day of its release.
Voters were indeed reached and the product did stand out: rarely has a campaign stunt triggered such overwhelming condemnation and revulsion. Within 24 hours, chatlogs surfaced showing the spoofbot making derogatory statements about Chan's accent. A long list of local and national political groups and figures signed onto a letter headlined by Nancy Pelosi calling out the stunt's inherent misogyny.
Wiener responded to this immediate backlash by doubling down and releasing a statement in support of his stunt, in which he called the complaints of Pelosi, et al, "baseless" and "a deflection," stating: “Chan and her supporters are aggressively trying to delegitimize the website precisely because they know it effectively communicates Chan’s horrible record on housing and so many other key issues." Wiener went on to take swipes at the legacy of Pelosi, who has endorsed his opponent.
A day later, as the backlash continued to escalate, Wiener's campaign took the chatbot down and conceded that it had "missed the mark" (though insisting they "heard from many people who loved the idea.") In the classic tradition of apology-adjacent PR language, Wiener wrote: “But many others were offended, and I apologize for causing that offense. Innovation means trying new things, and it also means being honest when something doesn’t land the way you intended.”
By way of a coda for this episode, the campaign assembled and promoted a rally under the winking moniker “Women for Scott” featuring its most prominent local women supporters, headlined by “Hilary Clinton’s soulmate” and Democratic Party mega-donor Susie Tompkins Buell and Chair of the tech-industry-captured local chapter of the San Francisco Democratic Party Nancy Tung testifying that the Connie Chan chatbot wasn’t misogynestic and slamming Connie Chan and Nancy Pelosi for suggesting otherwise.
While this misadventure stole some attention from Scott Wiener’s policy program of getting government out of the way of the real estate industry and serving Silicon Valley’s quest for absolute dominance, ConnieChan.ai likely said far more about Scott Wiener - his judgement and relationship to the AI boombubble - than it did about his opponent.
