The thing you've outlined sounds to me like news media, sort of, as well as implicitly leaning on existing news media. The amount of information entailed is comparable; having up-to-date info on over 3000 United States counties is a far from trivial endeavor.[1]
It's different of course in that existing news media isn't remotely incentivized to support this kind of work, instead being caught in the tar pit of getting eyeballs and ad dollars, as well as being an arena which monied interests know they need to optimize for. Of course if the tool you're describing became well-known, it would also become subject to competitive pressures from without.
And in practice, the number of people who would get value from it is probably not all that much different from the number of people who already are already immersed in activism. You get marginal gains from more efficient allocation of some of the ones who are just kind of being pulled along by their social networks.
Could a GPT-X in principle maybe help scrape through every local paper, every town council pdf, and output useful insight that current activist communities don't already have access to if they're sufficiently motivated? I think eventually yes, but by the time AI is that powerful there might be more important things to worry about.
If you want to offer info at the town level, it gets even worse. There are nearly 20,000 incorporated towns cities and villages, although 3/4s are under 5k population.
Your proposal is well-structured and interesting but has a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed. Interest keyword-based filtering will primarily encourage politics-as-identity, which is actively harmful - it directs attention towards zero-sum thinking and performative identities, rather than creative problem solving. As Bryan Caplan demonstrates in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people already tend to vote to express identities and affiliations rather than to achieve better outcomes. We shouldn't build tools that further entrench this destructive pattern.
Instead, imagine a tool that:
This approach would ground political participation in the solving of one's own problems rather than identity expression. While technically more challenging to implement than interest-based filtering, it would generate higher-quality engagement that expands our collective problem-solving capacity rather than just reallocating political power between existing interest groups.
The patterns emerging from aggregated user experiences would naturally reveal systemic issues and preventive opportunities, especially in how regulations and policies interact to shape people's choices and planning horizons. While building reliable AI judgment about political causation is challenging, it's better to attempt something hard that would be beneficial if feasible, than to facilitate the destructive forces of identity-based politics simply because they're easier to implement.
Upvoted on the basis of clarity, useful / mentoring tone, and the value of the suggestions. Thank you for coming back to this.
In a first-pass read, there is not much I would add, save for mentioning that I’d expect (1)-(4) to change from what they are now were they to actually be implemented in some capacity, given the complexities (jurisdictional resources, public desire, participation, etc…).
I have the Myth of The Rational Voter on my shelf unread!
If I have any sufficiently useful or interesting ideas or comments regarding your remarks, I will add them here.
This would likely need to be a tool for local organizing that contains manuals. most of the information on the tool will be out of date and there needs to be a clear process for how to make it up to date, despite that people who potentially disagree with each other strongly would be updating it. AI could be included in the tool to help update it, but AI couldn't be the final authority at this time.
some references for content I'd suggest including, at least by reference - I make absolutely no attempt to be neutral in my recommendations:
some bonus resources I think are relevant to effective organizing - note that you don't have to completely agree with these resources to learn from them and produce worlds that are better in subsets of the ways the authors intend:
some more non-electoral resources I've encountered recently but which I'm not sure are good-according-to-me yet, and I link anyway because they seem promising based on initial assessment and how I discovered them:
https://github.com/StampyAI/stampy-ui looks like an interesting tool to use on something like this
For politics and governance in the US, does there exist a tool that:
If this tool doesn't exist, how much value would people get from it if it existed? How difficult would it be to implement each part? (please point me to any tools / organizations that roughly fulfill the duties outlined in the bullet points)
Lastly, w.r.t. the point
I think GPT-X might work well for summarizing and distilling legal language - has this been done already?