Never Back Down, the pro-Ron DeSantis SuperPAC, is launching a massive, $25 million text message campaign over the next two months targeting Republican voters in a desperate effort to catch up with the presidential primary front-runner, former President Donald Trump. Instead of a volunteer or campaign worker, however, voters who receive a text from Never Back Down will be interacting with an AI chat bot.
The shift in Never Back Down’s political messaging strategy is driven in part by fiscal constraints – the SuperPAC has struggled to reach its $230 million fundraising goal – and by the failure of its television and radio ad campaign to sway voters towards Governor DeSantis. Chris Wilson, the SuperPAC’s data director, claims the AI-powered text campaign is more efficient in reaching voters – noting that the text messages alone can reach 70 percent of their voter targets in Iowa.
Large scale text operations can be costly for political campaigns, however. The Federal Communications Commission bars the use of auto-dialers, meaning that each text messages be individually sent by a human operator. Never Back Down has outsourced this task to third-party vendors who typically charge a few cents per message. The SuperPAC’s AI chatbot will handle subsequent text interactions with voters.
The National Pulse previously reported on South Carolina resident Alan Johnson’s encounter with Never Back Down’s AI chatbot – while it was apparently still in testing. When Johnson, a computer programmer, realized that he was conversing with an artificial intelligence and not an actual human, he used a series of prompts to make the chatbot write him a song about former President Barack Obama.
