New York City's mayoral race has taken an unusually tech-centric turn with the revelation that one candidate's housing plan bears the unexpected imprint of artificial intelligence. This Sunday, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched his housing strategy amid pointed scrutiny from rivals who accuse him of leaning on AI, namely ChatGPT, to craft the plan. In a contentious collaborative display, four Democratic mayoral hopefuls condemned Cuomo's record on housing, linking his tenure as governor to the city's present-day affordability crunch. According to ABC7NY, Council speaker Adrienne Adams stated that "In his final year as governor, New York City lost 66,000 rent-stabilized apartments and that isn't right," under Cuomo's watch, directly contesting his abilities to remedy the situation.
Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Cuomo's campaign rejected these claims, emphasizing his broad-based support, as "leading in every poll in every borough, and with every race and gender," but this defense has been somewhat eclipsed by a technological snafu involving his housing proposal. Despite promises made at a church service to create half a million "affordable" housing units, Cuomo's plan included nonsensical text and even a hyperlink leading back to ChatGPT. Highlighting the botched document, City Council speaker Adrienne Adams criticized Cuomo on social media, saying, "Andrew Cuomo asked ChatGPT what his housing policy should be. Guess someone does need on-the-job training," as per an article by The New York Times.
In defense, Paul Francis, a policy adviser for the Cuomo campaign, explained that the irregularities in the document were attributable to difficulties with voice recognition software, a necessary tool given his one-handed typing capabilities due to an amputation. Francis owned up to using ChatGPT for research in a mode akin to how one might utilize Google and insisted that any artificial intelligence usage was purely for that purpose. He clarified, "It clearly was not a writing tool; it was a research tool," in an interview with The New York Times.
The stakes of this debate are heightened by the city's severe housing predicament, with over 120,000 New Yorkers resorting to shelters in January, including more than 40,000 children. Fully employed adults stay in homeless shelters as rents soar out of reach. Cuomo's vision proposes a 10-year plan, mirroring current Mayor Eric Adams's previous strategy, involving tax incentives for developers, funneling more funds into affordable housing, and investing pension dollars into development. Yet, amidst the unveiling of "Addressing New York’s Housing Crisis," the errant hyperlink containing the ChatGPT reference, despite edits, underscored persisting errors in his policy brief. Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the Cuomo campaign, quipped, "If it was written by ChatGPT, we wouldn’t have had the errors," still defending the original intent of the controversial document, as detailed by The New York Times.
