Looking for a patsy, ex-New York governor and current NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo found one: a one-armed man.
As the New York Times reports, the aide in question, longtime Cuomo adviser Paul Francis, admitted to using ChatGPT to craft the disgraced former governor‘s new, typo-riddled housing policy plan.
“It’s very hard to type with one hand,” Francis, who had his left arm amputated in 2012 following a sudden illness, told the NYT. “So I dictate, and what happens when you dictate is that sometimes things get garbled. And try as I might to see them when I proofread, sometimes they get by me.”
The “things” that “got by” the career wonk include, but are not limited to, a headline with the term “objectively” misspelled as “Bbjectively,” the mask-off claim that rent control is “symbolic,” and a link to a 2024 Gothamist article that cited ChatGPT as the sourced used to pull it up.
Though the 29-page policy document has since been updated to remove its more glaring mistakes, an archived version of the original thing shows the embarrassing errors in all their glory.
The excuse also doesn’t quite add up. There’s nothing wrong with using dictation software, but why would that cause blatant spelling errors or a reference to ChatGPT? And why wasn’t someone else reviewing the document before pushing it out? All told, it sounds a lot like a fictional explanation crafted by a political campaign to deter critics by throwing a man with a disability under the bus.
Prior to Francis’ admission in the NYT, the Cuomo campaign went back and forth with local news website Hell Gate as to whether ChatGPT was used to write the document.
After an initial non-denial from spokesperson Rich Azzopardi that thanked the outlet for “pointing out the grammar” errors, followed up with a longer explanation about the use of voice recognition software, and then claimed that the person who wrote the policy paper insisted they didn’t use AI to write it.
In a statement to Hell Gate, housing advocate Cea Weaver used the ChatGPT-generated errors to clown on the scandalous ex-governor.
“[Cuomo’s] campaign is so out of touch that he is outsourcing housing policy to a robot,” Weaver, the director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, told the site. “But New Yorkers don’t need ChatGPT to tell us that we need a rent freeze — it’s ‘bbjective.'”
Obviously, this is far from the first time a politician has been caught using AI — and with the way things are going, it certainly won’t be the last.
More on inapproprite AI uses: Judge Goes Ballistic When Man Shows AI-Generated Video in Court
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