Virginia candidate created AI bot of incumbent Beyer to debate him

VIRGINIA, USA — In Virginia’s 8th District, Congressman Don Beyer is expected to cruise to another win to represent Northern Virginia. This campaign season he has participated in one official debate with his three challengers, but has declined to a second.

That led one of his opponents to an idea, create a Don-Bot to debate.

Bentley Hensel is running as an Independent in the 8th District. He knows he is a longshot to topple the five-term congressman.

Hensel told WUSA9, that Beyer will not participate in the next scheduled debate on October 17th but, Hensel wants another chance to challenge the incumbent anyway.

Being an engineer, I solved the problem the way I know how,” he smiled. “I built an A.I. of Don Beyer. A ‘Don Bot’ as they say.”

Hensel’s new debate opponent is straight out of the Artificial Intelligence world.  

“If he doesn't want to be there his policies can,” Hensel said. “It gives pretty accurate responses. When asked, ‘Should you vote for Bentley Hensel? It says, ‘No, you should vote for me, Don Beyer.’"

Hensel wrote the program using Open AI’s chat GPT. It’s a text-based bot. so the user inputs a question and the answers get pulled from Beyer’s campaign website and press releases.

“If you ask [the Bot], ‘Does a woman have the right to an abortion? It responds, ‘Absolutely!’ And it includes a link to his website. I tried to be really unbiased and actually represent him accurately.”

At the next debate, Hensel plans on having these responses play out in audio.

So is this whole ‘Don Bot’ legal?

We reached out to several elections law experts and the consensus we got was there isn’t much Congressman Beyer can do to stop the debate between the remaining candidates and the Don Bot.

But one company has tried.

“I tackled a Hornet's Nest apparently and Open AI has decided to ban my accounts,” he said

As a result, the Don Bot was shut down Wednesday morning.

But not for long, Hensel is building a new Don Bot using his own resources because he is determined to debate Don.

“I got in this race to talk about some issues and actually show that you can make a difference and actually the solutions to these major problems our country is facing really aren't that hard,” he said.

We reached out to Don Beyer’s office and campaign. They have not responded to our request for comments about the Don Bot.

However, in an article with Reuters, Beyer’s staff commented: 

“He continues to be a leading voice in Congress on the need to improve artificial intelligence regulation, including legislation to prevent nefarious actors from utilizing AI to spread election misinformation."