In an age where reality is increasingly shaped by digital manipulation and curated narratives, Kamala Harris may be the first glimpse into a very undemocratic future.
Harris, a 59-year-old woman who has been in public office for nearly three decades, is now a presidential candidate whose substance has been hollowed out and replaced by whatever the situation demands. Harris might just the first "AI candidate"—a living, breathing embodiment of a political chatbot, ready to generate the responses her handlers and the media desire.
Consider Harris' political career, which has been marked by a series of transformations so rapid and contradictory that they could only be compared to the shifting opinions of an algorithm programmed to maximize user satisfaction.
During her time as California’s attorney general, she presented herself as a progressive prosecutor who balanced her record of jailing parents of truants with opposition to the death penalty, support for sanctuary cities and second-chance programs for violent criminals. One illegal immigrant released by Harris went on to take part in a violent robbery that left a woman with a fractured skull.
Fast forward to her presidential campaign in 2020, and Harris had reinvented herself as an even more liberal “progressive reformer,” who advocated for taxpayer funded sex-change operations, decriminalizing illegal immigration, and elimination of employee-sponsored health insurance programs. Like an AI trained to detect trends and pivot accordingly, Harris seamlessly transitioned from one identity to another, with little regard for the logical inconsistencies that trailed behind her.
Like the beta-release of an AI program that was rushed to market, Kamala Harris is frequently patched with superficial upgrades to fix glaring issues and mask underlying problems. Even Joe Biden “privately and repeatedly shared versions of a common observation about Harris: She doesn’t seem to know who she wants to be,” according to a 2022 book written by Politico reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns.
Chatbots don’t always get things right, which is why the most used AI platforms like ChatGPT and Grok have disclaimers that users should verify the information they are given. Unfortunately for American voters, the mainstream media is totally unconcerned with whatever responses are generated by KamalaGPT.
It wasn’t always this way.
Throughout her career in public office, the media reporting on Vice President Harris has been thorough, deeply sourced, and devastating. As a senator, Harris was known more for the dysfunction in her office than any notable achievements. Her presidential campaign was widely regarded as a fiasco that was over almost as quickly as it began. Her time as vice president was unsteady, disappointing and embarrassing, so much so that just last year, Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote “the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.” A top aide to Harris put it even more bluntly to liberal authors Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen: “This person should not be president of the United States.”
However, once Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the media quickly changed out the training data and reconfigured the algorithm. Suddenly, the same outlets that had questioned her competence began to rewrite her narrative, downplaying her failures and reinventing her as a strong, capable leader. This seamless reprogramming of her public image, with little regard for the inconsistencies, underscores how easily reality can be manipulated in the AI age.
Sadly, Democrats are not alone in embracing this artificial reality future.
On the other side of the political spectrum, some Republicans wish that Donald Trump would also become a version of himself that doesn’t exist. They long for a Trump who doesn’t speak off-the-cuff, who sticks to scripted policy speeches, and who suppresses the instinct for unfiltered speech that propelled him to victory in 2016. In essence, they want Trump to become his own AI-generated candidate—delivering a polished, inoffensive version of himself that aligns with their vision for victory.
This open desire by Democrats and the media on one side, and establishment Republicans on the other, that the two candidates running for president present images of themselves that do not comport with reality raises some disturbing questions about our future: Do we even need real people to run for office anymore?
If Harris can avoid substantive interactions with the media and any interrogation of her thoughts and record, effortlessly pivot from one identity to another, with the media and her advisers smoothing over the inconsistencies, what’s to stop future candidates from taking it a step further?
The technology already exists to create AI-generated videos of candidates speaking on any issue, with every word carefully crafted by teams of strategists or artificial intelligence. What’s preventing Kamala from embracing a Digital Twin to help her avoid live scrutiny while her AI-generated doppelganger delivers the perfect soundbites? The image projected to voters is already one that doesn’t exist in reality, why not go further to present an iKamala that is polished, unerring, and even more utterly devoid of authenticity. You can practically envision the think pieces in the Atlantic: “Why Kamala Harris running an AI campaign is good, actually.”
This might sound far-fetched, but it’s not as distant as we’d like to believe. Joe Biden ran his campaign for president from his basement, and the fact that the current president of the United States is not a fully functioning human being, and that the media seems largely uncurious and unconcerned about it, shows just how much we have normalized rule by a technocratic oligarchy. The media knows the country is not being run by Joe Biden, but rather by a clutch of unelected bureaucrats whose names you don’t know, you didn’t vote for, and who are making decisions about your country and your life without any accountability – and they don’t care.
Kamala Harris is the first AI candidate in all but name, a politician whose substance has been replaced by simulation. And if we allow this trend to continue, she won’t be the last. The future of our democracy may very well hinge on whether we choose real leaders with genuine convictions or settle for algorithmic avatars, optimized for victory but hollow at their core.
Alberto E. Martinez is a Republican strategist and veteran of three presidential campaigns who also served as chief of staff to United States Senator Marco Rubio.