Artificial intelligence offering political practices advice about robocalls in Montana GOP internal spat

This article was originally published by Montana Free Press.

The robocalls to John Sivlan’s phone this summer just wouldn’t let up. Recorded messages were coming in several times a day from multiple phone numbers, all trashing state Republican Rep. Llew Jones, a shrewd, 11-term lawmaker with an earned reputation for skirting party hardliners to pass the Legislature’s biggest financial bills, including the state budget. 

Sivlan, 80, a lifelong Republican who lives in Jones’ northcentral Montana hometown of Conrad, wasn’t amused by the general election-style attacks hitting his phone nearly a year before the next legislative primary. Jones, in turn, wasn’t impressed with the Commissioner of Political Practices’ advice that nothing could be done about the calls. The COPP polices campaigns and lobbying in Montana, and the opinion the office issued in response to a request from Jones to review the robocalls was written not by an office employee but instead authored by ChatGPT. 

“They were coming in hot and heavy in July,” Sivlan said on Aug. 26 while scrolling through his messages. “There must be dozens of these.”

“Did you know that Llew Jones sides with Democrats more than any other Republican in the Montana Legislature? If he wants to vote with Democrats, Jones should at least switch parties,” the robocalls said.

“And then they list his number and tell you to call him and tell him,” Sivlan continued.

In addition to the robocalls, a string of ads running on streaming services targeted Jones. On social media, placement ads depicted Jones as the portly, white-suited county commissioner Boss Hogg from “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV comedy of the early 1980s. None of the ads or calls disclosed who was paying for them.

Jones told Capitolized that voters were annoyed by the messaging, but said most people he’s talked to weren’t buying into it. He assumes the barrage was timed to reach voters before his own campaign outreach for the June 2026 primary.

The COPP’s new AI helper concluded that only ads appearing within 60 days of an election could be regulated by the office. The ads would also have to expressly advise the public on how to vote to fall under campaign finance reporting requirements.

In the response emailed to Jones, the AI program followed its opinion with a very chipper “Would you like guidance on how to monitor or respond to such ads effectively?”

“I felt that it was OK,” Commissioner Chris Gallus said of the AI opinion provided to Jones. “There were some things that I probably would have been more thorough about. Really at this point I wanted Llew to see where we were at that time with the (AI) build-out, more than explicit instructions.”

The plan is to prepare the COPP’s AI system for the coming 2026 primary elections, at which point members of the COPP staff will review the bot’s responses and supplement when necessary. But the system is already on the commissioner’s website, offering advice based solely on Montana laws and COPP’s own data, and not on what it might scrounge from the internet, according to Gallus.

Earlier this year, the Legislature put limits on AI use by government agencies, including a requirement for government disclosure and oversight of decisions and recommendations made by AI systems. The bill, by Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, was opposed by only a handful of lawmakers.

Gallus said the artificial intelligence system at COPP is being built by 3M Data, a vendor with previous experience with machine learning for the Red Cross and the oil companies Shell and Exxon, where systems gathered and analyzed copious amounts of operational data. COPP has about $38,000 to work with, Gallus said.

The pre-primary battles within the Montana Republican Party are giving the COPP’s machine learning an early test, while also exposing loopholes in campaign reporting laws. 

There is no disclosure law for the ads placed on streaming services, unlike ad details for traditional radio and TV stations, cable and satellite, which must be available for public inspection under Federal Communications Commission law. The state would have to fill that gap, which the FCC and Federal Election Commission have struggled to do since 2011. 

Streaming now accounts for 45% of all TV viewing, according to Nielsen, more than broadcast and cable combined. Cable viewership has declined 39% since 2021.

“When we asked KSEN (a popular local radio station) who was paying for the ads, they didn’t know,” Jones said. “People were listening on Alexa.”

Nonetheless, Jones said the robocalls are coming from within the Republican house. An effort by hardliners to purge more centrists legislators from the party has been underway since April, when the MTGOP executive board began “rescinding recognition” of the state Republican senators who collaborated with a bipartisan group of Democrats and House Republicans to pass a budget, increase teacher pay and lower taxes on primary homes.

Being Republican doesn’t require recognition by the MTGOP  “e-board,” as it’s known. In June, when the party chose new leadership, newly elected Chair Art Wittich said the party would no longer stay neutral in primary elections and would look for conservative candidates to support. 

Republicans who have registered campaigns for the Legislature were issued questionnaires Aug. 17 by the Conservative Governance Committee, a group chaired by Keith Regier, a former state legislator and father of a Flathead County family that’s sent three members to the Montana Legislature; in 2023 Keith  Regier and two of his children served in the Legislature simultaneously.

Membership for the Conservative Governance Committee and a new Red Policy Committee to prioritize legislative priorities is still a work in progress, new party spokesman Ethan Holmes said this week. 

The 14 questions, which Regier informed candidates could be used to determine party support of campaigns, hit on standard Republican fare: guns, “thoughts on transgenderism,” and at what point human life starts. There was no question about a willingness to follow caucus leadership. Regier’s son, Matt, was elected Senate president late 2024, but lost control of his caucus on the first day of the legislative session in January.