Starmer's ‘synthetic voters' show Downing Street's lost the plot

Telegraph

07-07-2025

In 1953 the communist government of East Germany was grappling with widespread unrest. It blamed the German public for not being appreciative enough of its political leadership.
'Would it not be simpler,' responded the playwright Bertolt Brecht, 'if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?'
Brecht was joking, of course. But the sentiment came to mind when considering Labour's current approach to artificial intelligence (AI).
The Spectator magazine reported this week that No10 is 'experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – fake focus groups of AI chatbots, who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. Instead of us telling the Government what we think, chatbots will ventriloquise on our behalf.
The initiative is said to be the brainchild of the Prime Minister's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and, as this column noted last year, it is being championed by one of his predecessors, Dominic Cummings.
A pioneer in this new field of synthetic voters is Ben Warner, the data guru who was a special adviser to the government between 2019 and 2021. Think of him as the Benji Dunn to Cummings' Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible.
As Cummings enthused last year, with AI you could test your policy or message on synthetic voters and get feedback quickly and cheaply.
Political advisers could ask a special AI chatbot what we think, and get an answer in seconds. No need to commission costly national polls or convene time-consuming focus groups.
Underpinning today's AI chatbots are large language models, statistical predictors that are fine-tuned mimics. They have ingested vast amounts of other people's thoughts and creative work, and can generate a pastiche of them on demand. The hope is that this pastiche is now good enough to augment or even replace the responses of real human beings.
'[If] you compare the output of that to an actual focus group transcript of people, most people can't tell the difference between the two,' claimed Cummings.
Warner is doing just that in a new venture called Electric Twin, which says that it can capture the messy nuance of humanity with reliable precision.
'Our synthetic populations are carefully crafted simulations of real-world populations,' Electric Twin explains on its website. Its models 'see and engage the fragments, the outliers and the disenfranchised. They understand the misunderstood'.
'We think this is an exciting technology with huge benefits for the public sector and think it is great if No10 is experimenting with this technology,' Warner told me, though he said Downing Street was not using Electric Twin but some other technology.
Downing Street didn't respond to a request for comment.
Alas, synthetic voters may simply be making a problem worse. The chief critique of Sir Keir Starmer is that he is out of touch. Hiding behind a computer screen is unlikely to dispel that image.
'Societies feel unknowable … leaders and teams are frequently blindsided,' Electric Twin's website asserts.
Forty years ago, that wasn't a problem. Politicians such as Thatcher, Healey and Foot revelled in open public hustings. They weren't scared of hearing what we thought. But political advisers became wary of their candidates making gaffes, and became obsessed with cosmetic presentation.
Focus groups were a sign that the political class had lost confidence in its own ideas, or maybe even run out of them. Once MPs retreated behind a wall of consultants, no wonder the public became a mystery. With AI, the consultants have simply contrived a paid-for solution to a problem they created.
However, it is difficult to see how the chatbots can help. The AI model can only be trained on what has already been said and written, so cannot originate authentic responses to new political ideas. For example, there is no corpus of public reaction to the idea that illegal immigrants to the UK should be sent to the Falkland Islands, for that idea has never been advanced.
'No doubt Starmer would prefer to inhabit a world in which an AI synthetic focus groups showed he and his policies were loved by the populace,' says the author Ewan Morrison, whose new dystopian thriller For Emma probes the post-human fantasies of the giant technology companies.
'The most dangerous thing is not that these AI surrogates develop some vast superintelligence, but that we lower ourselves to their level, becoming dependent on technologies that are riddled with inaccuracies,' he thinks.
'Today's AI is a synthetic slop information generator, so any government that incorporates this flawed technology will hit trouble.'
Cummings, in his promotion of the concept last year, became visibly excited by extending the idea even further. He muses how chatbots could generate targeted videos aimed at specific demographics. He starts to say such an idea would be 'science fiction', but stops himself.
This is rather a giveaway. Much like his determination to put giant data dashboards into Whitehall and turn the Government into a sci-fi control room, it's the ultimate fantasy of the consultant class to become the controller of our destiny, a mini master of the universe. But it's a very sterile view of the world in which we are not humans, just data to be filtered and processed.
Why are Labour and Cummings so obsessed with this science fiction fantasy of AI as the solution to all their problems, following a script written by Silicon Valley?
Maybe because, to paraphrase another poet and dramatist TS Eliot, the modern politician cannot bear very much reality.