Greek elections 2023: Intelligent AI assistant compares party programs

If navigating through the official programs of the parties vying for the vote of Greek voters seems to be difficult or time-consuming, Artificial Intelligence technology, claims to offer a simple and minimally time-consuming solution for anyone looking for answers.

With this goal in mind, a group of scientists set up a tool called toraksero.gr, an “AI assistant for party programs that with a few ‘clicks’ creates a digital debate of the parties’ positions that the voter will meet at the the ballot box behind τηε screen” explained Stavros Vassos, an expert in Artificial Intelligence with more than 20 years of experience in academia, research and AI, speaking to public radio station “Praktorio 104.9FM”.

“toraksero.gr is a new tool developed by a team of 35+ people that have set up to offer Conversational AI solutions and it has been online for a week, with a very good response from the public” said the Greek scientist, explaining that creating a platform where users would ask questions about each party’s political strategy had been on their minds for a long time. The team behind the AI tool advanced this when they realized that it is not a matter of a few clicks to find valid information about the policies of each party, and this was often not possible for the voter to do in a short time, from publications, videos and other sources.

Additional assistant for the ballot box

“We decided to ultimately only use the official, publicly published party programs that are available to the public. With the final result of the software in toraksero.gr, the citizen can see what the parties propose on issues such as education, taxation, etc. easily and quickly without doing the research himself.

In any case, the system is definitely something that works in a complementary way, since a politician who is in the party can say something about a certain topic, beyond what is said in the published program, for example”, explained the Greek Artificial Intelligence expert highlighting how the online service allows users to ask questions through a “chat” about the official positions of Greek political parties.

The site/platform essentially answers a question related to a party’s program, a solution that is based on the technology called Conversational AI. “Citizens, in their question, can put a free text, a sentence, question or even just one word and the system answers through officially published programs in “natural language”, like a digital assistant” said Mr. Vassos.

When will we not get an answer?

The basis of the technology that drives this electoral AI assistant “is Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 which is the basis of ChatGPT”, explains the AI expert, pointing out, however, how sometimes a citizen does not see an answer to a question they ask. This will be because there will be no official position in the official program of the given party on the given issue.

“It sometimes happens that thematic sections are missing in the official party programs, so the citizen will see when he asks his question that Artificial Intelligence does not “answer”. There may be answers to these questions in other announcements – for example of the party, but then the program will not answer since for reasons of objectivity it only has as “food” the official answers of the parties’ programs”, explains Mr. Vassos.