Opinion: Actually, more mayoral campaigns should use AI

Like many New Yorkers, I find myself increasingly using various AI tools to help streamline my work. Today, I asked ChatGPT to characterize the state of the NYC mayoral election:

“​The 2025 New York City mayoral election is shaping up to be one of the most tumultuous and unpredictable races in the city's history. With a crowded field of candidates, a sitting mayor running as an independent, and a city grappling with issues ranging from public safety to housing affordability, the stakes have never been higher.​”

That’s a pretty good summary! And it is true that the stakes are incredibly high. Which is why it’s crucial that the candidates embrace all tools at their disposal to responsibly run the tightest, most efficient and most effective campaigns in order to show us, the voters, that they will do the same once in City Hall. This is especially true when it comes to new technologies.

This week, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign caught some flack for reportedly relying on ChatGPT to write portions of its housing plan. The campaign quickly explained that the errors in the plan were the result of “voice-to-text” technology and botched proofreading, and that ChatGPT was used for research help only, not to develop the actual proposed policies. But the other candidates piled on: Brad Lander said, “If you want, like, a ChatGPT Mayor, Andrew Cuomo’s your guy.” Scott Stringer debuted “CuomoGPT,” a spoof “AI chatbot trained on 30 years of press attacks and zero accountability.” Zohran Mandami shared ChatGPT’s response to “How would you describe a politician that hides from the press, rarely appears in public and plagiarizes his policy agenda from AI?” and added, “I wouldn’t use it to write policy but ChatGPT is correct about a candidate who does.” 

At Tech:NYC, part of our mission is to think about how the tech sector and its tools can be used to responsibly move New York City forward. This internet kerfuffle is a complete distraction and, I worry, an impediment from thinking about AI in the most productive way. Put simply, the campaigns should be using AI to get more done in a short time frame with limited resources. 

Granted, there should always be a human who does the fact-checking as well as clear disclaimers about the use of AI. But candidates who shame the use of AI risk looking like those who thought Barack Obama’s 2008 digital strategy was gimmicky, or that Dwight Eisenhower’s use of short and catchy TV ads in 1952 had no place in politics. 

In fact, harnessing emerging technology is something that we should want our political leaders to do, so long as it’s done in a thoughtful and intentional way.

Through our Decoded Futures initiative, which helps nonprofits across the city build AI capacity, we’ve seen firsthand how AI can be used to effectively streamline operations – not to replace human-led work, but to handle basic tasks that free up humans to spend more time on complex, hands-on work that they otherwise might not have the bandwidth for. Political campaigns, like nonprofits, are made up of lean teams that are constantly trying to accomplish huge feats with limited resources, and they could learn from the experiences of the Decoded Futures nonprofits, which have used AI to be more responsive to the communities they serve, streamline grant applications and develop lesson plans, among a wide range of other applications. 

Needless to say, we live in very complicated political times, where scores of New Yorkers (and Americans more broadly) seem to have lost faith in government. I think a big reason for this is that consumer technology has made day-to-day life so much easier for so many people. Take, for instance, touch-to-pay technology. When I was growing up, my mom would pull out her checkbook and write checks at the grocery store. Today, my kids see me whip out my phone, touch it to a screen and we walk out. It’s small things like this that make technology feel like magic. The juxtaposition between this and our government’s seeming inability to modernize has never felt more extreme.

Instead of a candidate pile-on about one campaign’s use of an AI tool, I’d urge each of the candidates to put forward clear plans on how they would safely and effectively implement technology, and AI tools specifically, to modernize government and serve more New Yorkers more effectively – a conversation the candidates seem uninterested in having at this stage. A race to the bottom here will get us precisely nowhere and pretending this technology is not useful – or is somehow going to go away – is foolish. AI is here to stay and the candidates would be wise to embrace it.