How we created an AI Bot to write Obama-like speeches. Yes we can!

A select few are great communicators. Most aren’t. AI can help the rest of us.

We trained an AI bot to review ten of President Obama’s greatest speeches and use that to write speeches on other topics. The goal was to understand how well AI could handle this task. This blog explains how we went about it. What speeches did we use? What is an AI Learning Model? How a customized AI Bot differs from the regular ChatGPT? What can be done to improve the content created?

How ChatGPT works (very simplified)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines like ChatGPT work on data that they have collected and labelled. The information that is used to train the bot is called Learning Data and most AI engines scrape data from the internet. This data can be good, bad or just pure disinformation. A chatbot interfaces with users, accepts their queries, finds the best answer based on its learning data and then provides an answer. The bot gets ‘smarter’ with time as it replies to more queries.

A customized AI chatbot is different in that it is fed specific data to learn from. For instance in this example, we gave OpenAI’s GPT-4 engine 10 of President Obama’s speeches to learn from. It’s important to respect ownership of the data that you are using to train the AI Chatbot. The New York Times just sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using its intellectual property. “The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work – Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.”

In this non-commercial experiment, we’ve used ten of President Obama’s speeches. They are publicly available on with attribution crediting him as the author. I believe that this use case comes under ‘Fair Use‘, but I am not a lawyer, and this is does not represent legal advice. Please consult with an attorney before undertaking any such project.

President Obama’s ten best speeches

The speeches we used in this experiment are from Elite Daily and other sources.

2004 — DNC Keynote Speech: “The Audacity of Hope”
2008 — Speech on Racism: “A More Perfect Union”
2008 — Election Victory Speech
2009 — Inaugural Address
2009 — Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
2015 — Selma Speech
2015 — Charleston Shooting Eulogy
2016 — Gun control speech
2016 — State of the Union
2016 — DNC Speech

Using the AI Chatbot

Once the bot was running we tried it with some simple prompts on issues like the importance of voting, protecting women’s freedoms and passing common sense gun safety laws. We tried the same prompts with both the regular ChatGPT bot and the Obama-like bot trained on custom learning data of his speeches. You can see how the AI bots permed with the same prompt here.

DemLabs is working with several progressive groups to see how AI can be applied to help them make a bigger impact. Learn more about how to collaborate with DemLabs.

TakeAway: Innovate!

Deepak
DemLabs

DISCLAIMER: ALTHOUGH THE DATA FOUND IN THIS BLOG AND INFOGRAPHIC HAS BEEN PRODUCED AND PROCESSED FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE, NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED CAN BE MADE REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, LEGALITY OR RELIABILITY OF ANY SUCH INFORMATION. THIS DISCLAIMER APPLIES TO ANY USES OF THE INFORMATION WHETHER ISOLATED OR AGGREGATE USES THEREOF.

Reposted from Democracy Labs with Permission