When an AI Avatar runs for governor
A Tokyo candidate for governor built an avatar and a suite of AI tools to ramp up engagement and co-create his manifesto
Meet the Tokyo candidate for governor who live-streamed for 17 days straight, answering 8,600 questions from potential voters. How?
Enter ‘AI Takahiro’, an avatar created by 33-year old candidate Anno Takahiro. The avatar’s livestream on YouTube was just one part of this former software engineer-turned-science-fiction writer’s ground-breaking campaign, born out of frustration with the one-sided nature of political communication.
Listen, co-create, engage
Takahiro was inspired by Plurality, a book by Audrey Tang, former Taiwan Minister of Digital Affairs, and Glen Weyl, co-Founder of the Plurality Institute and Research Lead of Microsoft Research's Plural Technology Collaboratory, together with a network of civic technologists, which explores collaborative governance and AI's potential. Takahiro harnessed AI capabilities to do three things, as described in this blog post in Futuropolis by Gideon Lichfield:
Listen: Partnering with the AI Objectives Institute’s Talk to the City tool, Takahiro’s team analyzed public sentiment from social media, news comments, and other digital sources. AI synthesized these insights into actionable themes, aligning his campaign messaging with voter priorities.
Co-Create: A GitHub-hosted manifesto invited citizens to propose edits, while AI aggregated and refined overlapping suggestions into cohesive updates.
Engage: The AI-driven avatar responded to voter questions in real-time, fostering deeper discussions about Takahiro’s policy platform. This live, two-way communication captivated voters and made Takahiro’s campaign a collaborative effort.
This participatory model paid off: Takahiro earned 154,000 votes—remarkable for an unaffiliated candidate in a competitive race. The campaign also demonstrated how technology can democratize access to political dialogue and decision-making.
Takahiro isn’t keeping his methods to himself. He’s open-sourcing his AI tools and processes, encouraging others to replicate his success. According to Futuropolis, at least two Japanese politicians have already launched their own AI avatars, signaling a broader shift in how technology can democratize political dialogue.
Global uptake in AI-enhanced engagement
Takahiro’s approach is part of a growing trend of leveraging AI to enhance civic engagement and policymaking, including in highly-polarized contexts. Dr. Lisa Schirch, author of the Toda Institute workshop report Deliberative Technology: Designing AI and Computational Democracy for Peacebuilding in Highly-Polarized contexts explains: “By enabling inclusive dialogue and collective decision-making, these tools foster collaboration, bridge divides, and create opportunities for more equitable and effective governance in polarized contexts.”
"Deliberative technologies are increasingly recognized as essential tools for strengthening democracy and rebuilding social trust,” writes Schirch.
Tools like Pol.is and Remesh enable large-scale deliberation by synthesizing citizen input into actionable insights. Pol.is has been a cornerstone of Taiwan's vTaiwan initiative, enabling widely accessible online discussions on contentious policy issues. By using AI-driven clustering and mapping of public sentiment, Pol.is supports deliberative processes that inform policymakers with clear insights into collective and divergent opinions.
Earlier this year, Remesh was used as part of a process led by the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) with hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian members of ALLMEP.
According to ALLMEP, Remesh enabled the engagement of a trusting virtual space for the participants who “responded in their own words– and in their native language– with often lengthy, complex and original answers to open-ended questions. Responses were translated in real time, so that each participant could then vote on each other’s ideas, ranking different statements by importance. Each session was followed by a poll to validate the AI analysis, and to help give participants a sense of the ideas and insights that they and their peacebuilding peers had aligned upon.”
Faster, more legitimate decisions
Aviv Ovadya, founder of the AI & Democracy Foundation, underscores the value of AI enabled deliberative tech, in an interview with Futuropolis. “One of the things that slows governments down now is the lack of political will and legitimacy around a decision. If you’re able to identify public agreement through deliberation, you can move forward in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to move.”
Ovadya envisions a future where deliberative processes produce binding decisions, compelling governments and AI companies to act.
While promising, AI-driven democracy isn’t without risks. Key concerns include:
Fragmentation: Hyper-personalized messaging may fragment voters into echo chambers, undermining collective discourse.
Inequity: Limited digital access risks excluding marginalized populations.
Bias and Manipulation: Without transparency and oversight, AI systems could entrench biases or be misused.
Ethical frameworks and oversight are critical to addressing these risks, as is ensuring broad inclusivity in the design and implementation of deliberative technologies.
In an era of democratic backsliding and polarization, AI offers tools to bridge divides and foster collaboration—if deployed responsibly. As Ovadya notes, deliberative processes can “help us find understanding and common ground—and create political will behind that common ground.”
Takahiro’s campaign inspires a future where political engagement is more interactive, inclusive, and effective. Whether through AI avatars, citizen assemblies, or deliberative platforms, technology has the potential to strengthen democracy and rebuild social trust.
Lena Slachmuijlder is Executive Director of Digital Peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground and Co-Chair of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.