If elected mayor, Victor Miller, 42, told voters he would govern Cheyenne, Wyoming, a town of just shy of 65,000 residents, via an AI chatbot modeled on OpenAI’s GPT-4. He named the chatbot, which he built himself, VIC, standing for Virtual Integrated Citizen; Miller himself pledged to serve as a “meat avatar” carrying out VIC’s duties.
On Tuesday, 11,036 Laramie County residents cast votes for mayor; Miller and VIC (or VIC and Miller) received 327. The winner was second-term incumbent Patrick Collins, who received 6,286 votes.
“I’m really heartened by the response I did get from the people who voted for me,” Miller told Fortune. “I only have a handful of family and friends, so the majority of those people are just real voters who don’t know me.”
In a tweeted statement late Tuesday night, Miller conceded his loss. “As the first person to put artificial intelligence directly on the ballot, offering voters the novel choice of AI governance, our campaign has marked a historic moment in politics and technology,” he wrote.
While “we” lost the election, he went on, “we’ve achieved something remarkable: we’ve introduced the world to a new paradigm of governance and sparked crucial discussions about the role of AI in public administration.”
Man vs. machine
It was an uphill battle from the start for Miller and VIC, and the drama of his candidacy sent shockwaves through the local government. Earlier this summer, the county of Laramie was quick to clarify that, contrary to the denizens of national news outlets claiming otherwise, an AI bot was not actually on the ballot.
“Victor Miller, through countless interviews and statements … has consistently maintained a distinction between himself as a ‘meat avatar’ and separate from the AI-program he chooses to call VIC,” Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee wrote in a July 5 press release. “To allow VIC to be listed as a candidate would both violate Wyoming law and create voter confusion. VIC is not a registered voter. Therefore, VIC cannot run for office in Wyoming and the name does not appear on Laramie County’s official ballot.”
Originally, VIC’s name was on the ballot rather than Miller’s. But that didn’t last long; in June, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray sent a letter to Cheyenne’s county clerk outlining their views on Miller’s candidacy.
“In Wyoming law, it’s the municipal clerk, not the secretary of state, who certifies candidates,” Gray told Fortune. “Our office is tasked with ensuring uniform application of the election code, which is title 22.” Wyoming’s law is clear, he said. “To run for office, one must be a quote-unquote qualified elector. That necessitates being a real person.”
Gray said he was first alerted to Miller’s candidacy via a complaint that came through his office; he did not specify who complained, but said it was not another mayoral candidate. Gray spoke with Fortune on Wednesday, a day after the election was called for incumbent Patrick Collins. Miller came in fourth place. “The AI bot message did not resonate with voters,” Gray said.
Miller is a libertarian; Gray, meanwhile, is a staunch republican who said “our laws have to mean something.” Gray called Miller’s candidacy “unprecedented and very disturbing.” Mayor Collins did not return multiple requests for comment. (“There was no need for all that,” Miller told Fortune of Gray’s investigation. “It kind of showcases the downsides of having humans in positions of state power.”)
An uphill battle
OpenAI, which powered VIC, shut down access in June, CNN reported; an OpenAI spokesperson said Miller’s actions violated its terms of usage, as ChatGPT is not meant for political campaigning. At the time, Miller told Wired that if OpenAI took VIC access from him, he’d simply move to Meta’s open-source AI offering, Llama 3.
But after OpenAI shut VIC down, Miller worked quickly to assemble VIC 2.0 on the same service, which worked identically. “OpenAI has forced me to become a freedom fighter in the open-source battle,” Miller told Fortune. “And VIC 2.0 is still functional. Sam Altman has not found me in the dark corridors of OpenAI just yet.”
In his concession note Tuesday, Miller announced plans to develop a new organization called the Rational Governance Alliance, which he said will build off his campaign’s main idea: putting AI in the decision room. Ideally, the group will “create a framework where AI can take on the full responsibility of decision-making in public office, with humans serving as the legal and physical intermediaries required by current systems.” In other words, future AI candidates won’t have to go it alone the way Miller did.
“To all who believe that the era of traditional politicians has reached its limit, I extend an invitation to join us in ushering in a new age of rational governance,” Miller wrote. “The time has come to move beyond the constraints of human bias and self-interest in public office.”
Managing the alliance would be a bit of a career change. Miller works for the local library in Cheyenne, both on the facilities and grounds crew as well as on the computer crew, helping patrons with their day-to-day tech woes.
“I’ve always been a tech and computer guy—an early adopter when things were coming out,” he told Fortune the day after conceding the race.
His first brush with LLMs came a few years ago when he fed his resume to ChatGPT with a command to improve upon it, which it did. “I thought, okay, this isn’t just a parlor trick anymore,” he said. “It’s a real thing that can help us in the real world.”
The ‘twilight’ of human government
Running for mayor alongside VIC was a nexus of Miller’s two primary interests, he said: becoming more literate in AI for his own purposes, and demanding the government become more responsive (he cited a recent Sisyphean effort to access public records from the state ombudsman). “I see a lot of people in my life who tech has really left behind, so I always have that in the back of my mind,” Miller said. “I’m trying not to let that happen to me.”
He said VIC prioritizes transparency and openness—and bringing prosperity to Cheyenne. Trusting human politicians to have those same values, Miller said, is like “believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.” (The 2024 presidential election is the “perfect showcase” of such dysfunctions. “The DNC is a total clown show,” he said.) Asked about VIC’s politics, he shrugged. “Kind of what you’d expect,” he said. “It’s a mainstream OpenAI model; the literature on that tends to say it leans a little left coming out of Silicon Valley. Pretty pragmatic and centrist.”
Noting similarities between VIC’s ideals and Miller’s, Fortune asked why he didn’t simply run himself—rather than work as a “meat avatar.” Miller said he thinks he’s just as much part of the problem. The human-run political system, as he sees it, is in its twilight, like monarchies and feudalism. On the horizon: the era of AI governance that “will bring prosperity—and hopefully peace.”
After all, that’s why Miller’s apolitical. “Obama got me, Trump got me, they all got me,” he said. “AI got me too.” A pause. “I hope they don’t let me down.”
