The AI tools we’ve been working on to make progressives’ jobs easier | Bridging Bytes and Ballots #17
By Lacy Crawford, Craig Johnson, and Nicolai Haddal of Unfiltered.Media
Welcome back to the Bridging Bytes and Ballots newsletter—helping you navigate the intersection of AI and politics. This week we’re discussing the new AI-powered tools recently launched by Unfiltered.Media’s Founder and President, Craig Johnson, and Director of AI Research, Nicolai Haddal. These tools are specifically designed to aid organizational communications for nonprofits and campaigns alike.
Let’s get to it.
Your Voice, Your Politics, Our Power
Change Agent is by and for people dedicated to making the world a better place. Change Agent is a large language model chatbot that organizations may use as an efficiency amplifier. With the capacity for document uploads, research, and coding- this tool is a comprehensive solution for progressives seeking a customized approach to integrating AI into their work.
Lacy: As someone on the political left, I entered politics very idealistically—hoping that my career choice could make positive change in the world. Now, it feels like changing the world for the better has been an uphill battle. Craig and Nicolai, can you describe Change Agent for our readers, and how it helps people make the world a better place?
Craig: Change Agent is our attempt to create a progressive ChatGPT—pre-trained and fine-tuned on progressive and empathetic content. Our tool is designed to match the tone and tenor of progressives. It’s also designed for the workload that many organizations face. Both in content creation, but also in recently-added data visualization to help with all of those messy sign-up forms or campaign results we deal with everyday.
Our vision is that in politics there are always three limited resources: Time, because there is always a vote or end point; people, because only so many people are interested and devoted to the hard asks like volunteering or canvassing; money, because even with the explosion of money in politics, there is never enough money in the right places to make change. Change Agent helps with that. It gives your team superpowers to compete with much larger operations.
My vision is that Change Agent can help us reach people where they are at. With its translation abilities, we hope that people can adapt their message so that when they talk to someone, they talk like them. We have a motto: to effectively engage with and persuade people you must look like and talk like them. Change Agent helps you do that at a scale not previously thought possible.
Nicolai: Lacy, I really share your perception that we’re facing an uphill battle from the idealist-left position, and now that AI has arrived like a bolt out of the blue, where do we stand? AI as an economic and social force has arrived and is here to stay. So it’s not a question of if we’ll work with artificial intelligence—it’s a question of how. As Craig explained above, our tool is designed to match the tone and tenor of progressives and my deep, sincere hope is that it will allow for the proliferation of fundamentally good, decent, and just ideas in a society where these ideas seem to be drowned out constantly. Here’s something I think about every day: we know progressive policy works, but too often those policies are ignored, disdained, or even repealed because extremely well-funded interests are hard at work every day distorting the truth. That’s why we face an uphill battle. Hopefully tools like Change Agent will help us equalize the playing field and give our ideas a fighting chance.
Your Inbox Never Looked So Good
Inbox Zero automatically sorts the endless out-of-offices, sets aside scams and hate mail, manages unsubscribes, and happily sends along your mailing address to donors who prefer to donate by check. All that's left for you are the high-value messages that actually deserve your attention. Inbox Zero users report that what took them an hour to do in the past now takes them just five minutes.
Lacy: How is Inbox Zero different from other email sorting programs or products like Clean Email and Mailbutler?
Nicolai: Inbox Zero is different because, much like Change Agent, it’s specifically tailored to recognize the types of emails that progressive organizers receive, and can ably sort out what needs to be addressed and what can be safely ignored. It’s funny, while Inbox Zero is an automation tool, I really see it as an opportunity for organizers to humanize themselves with their supporters. When we become successful and build enormous lists of supporters, there’s simply too much of a noise-to-signal ratio that comes back our way each time we send out an action alert or fundraising email. Inbox Zero lets you actually recognize ways you can reach out to people, answering genuine questions or comments, while the bot takes care of menial tasks like unsubscribe requests, or requests for where to mail a check instead of giving online. I think people are more likely to become loyal supporters if they feel they are heard. Inbox Zero is a great way to help your organization to build those ties.
Craig: We often say AI tools are best served as efficiency amplifiers, which is the case with Inbox Zero. The previously taxing task—both in time and emotions—of filtering negative comments and hate speech is now easier and has a more manageable, streamlined engagement process. By automating mundane and repetitive tasks, we're not just saving time but also protecting our team's mental health from negativity that can sometimes flood inboxes. This focus shift allows us to truly engage with the messages that matter, fostering a closer connection with supporters and stakeholders alike. This tool is a testament to how technology, when leveraged intentionally, can enhance human connections rather than diminish them.
Empowering Insights, Transforming Conversations
Foreteller AI revolutionizes the analysis of social media discourse, providing organizations with critical insights to drive impactful change. This powerful tool dives into public conversations, identifying nuanced positions on key issues like Social Security, enabling change-makers to tailor messages that truly resonate and mobilize.
Lacy: Out of all of the products we are showcasing today I am most excited by Foreteller. The possibilities it can offer seem like a real game changer. Tell us more.
Nicolai: Much like Inbox Zero, Foreteller is addressing a signal-to-noise problem. Here’s a fun fact: The Twitter/X service that connects people to all the tweets being produced in real time (the “API”) is known as the “Firehose.” It’s an apt term—there’s a huge flow of information constantly sent out into the void of the internet. How can we hope to get anything useful out of that much content? Imagine trying to describe every little drop of water being pushed out of a firehose—that’s the sort of scale we’re up against, even if we try to get more specific and look at how people are talking about issues like Social Security or gun control on social media. But if all that information could somehow be analyzed, that would help organizers understand how fired up people are about particular issues, what they actually think about those issues, and how they’re talking about those issues. Previously that wasn’t easy to do. But Foreteller has the power to categorize language at an enormous scale that not even dozens of human volunteers could do effectively. So I agree—Foreteller is extremely exciting!
And there’s more to come.
Craig: Foreteller is the tool we cut our teeth in AI on, and in the process we learned some of the base skills necessary to create Change Agent. AI has been in use widely in the commercial space for over a decade. Largely relegated to classifier AIs and machine learning, many of the largest services you use today such as Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, etc. utilize it to manage content at scale. Foreteller is a classifier AI that allows us to run complex language analysis, which helps us to tell if your message matches the public. Want to know if any Facebook comments on your page match right-wing messages? We can make a custom classifier model that tells you that, giving you the ability to process millions of messages quickly. It’s useful when doing traditional polls as well, because we can give you an overall idea of the landscape before you dive deeper.