6 ms·

I used Google Gemini Pro to compare party manifestos for an Indian election

3 points by shijithpk 2y ago

shijithpk 2y ago
Hi, my name is Shijith and I'm a data journalist from India. So we have a state election in Delhi this week (Feb 5), and I wanted to make a guide to help residents decide who to vote for. Now parties usually declare their political platforms, their programs etc. in manifestos released before the election. These manifestos are 20-30 pages long sometimes, and can be a slog to get through. And if there is a particular issue you're worried about, say pollution, it's difficult to compare them all at once. I decided to bring AI into the picture to compare the manifestos on 10 key issues like pollution and eduction. Specifically, I used Google's AI model Gemini 1.5 Pro to scrape the various pdfs and generate the text for the comparison. The github repo contains the python code I used to interact with the API. You can see the guide I created at https://data.indianexpress.com/projects/manifesto-guide https://data.indianexpress.com/projects/manifesto-guide I also wrote a long twitter thread that goes into more detail on how this was made: https://x.com/shijith/status/1879145563234648564 https://x.com/shijith/status/1879145563234648564 If you have any questions or feedback, do let me know. Thanks! -shijith
- ksynwa 2y ago
  The Indian Express page should explicitly state that the comparison was done using AI. Maybe it's because I am on mobile but I don't see anything of that sort.
  - shijithpk 2y ago
    i am writing about this on hacker news, have posted a twitter thread about it and also put up my code on Github. Nothing is being hidden here mate, dont know how much more transparent I can get :)
    - ksynwa 2y ago
      > dont know how much more transparent I can get A lot more by mentioning on the actual page that the main content is AI generated considering that the neither the GitHub repo nor the Twitter thread nor this thread are mentioned on the page which is meant for public consumption. There is a disclaimer for this on the desktop page. But when rendered on mobile it isn't there. :)
      - shijithpk 2y ago
        > There is a disclaimer for this on the desktop page. But when rendered on mobile it isn't there. Hmm, wonder why this guy chose to do it this way. Was it a design decision? Was it because of the tight space? We will never know.
        ksynwa 2y ago
        Ah yes. Mobile web pages famous for not being able to fit in 58 characters. :)
        shijithpk 2y ago
        Because mobile design is all about fitting in text wherever you can, right? :)
        ksynwa 2y ago
        Absolutely. With one tenth of the effort that you put into bragging about throwing three documents at an LLM it is certainly doable. :)

3 points by shijithpk 2y ago

Hi, my name is Shijith and I'm a data journalist from India. So we have a state election in Delhi this week (Feb 5), and I wanted to make a guide to help residents decide who to vote for. Now parties usually declare their political platforms, their programs etc. in manifestos released before the election. These manifestos are 20-30 pages long sometimes, and can be a slog to get through. And if there is a particular issue you're worried about, say pollution, it's difficult to compare them all at once. I decided to bring AI into the picture to compare the manifestos on 10 key issues like pollution and eduction. Specifically, I used Google's AI model Gemini 1.5 Pro to scrape the various pdfs and generate the text for the comparison. The github repo contains the python code I used to interact with the API. You can see the guide I created at https://data.indianexpress.com/projects/manifesto-guide https://data.indianexpress.com/projects/manifesto-guide I also wrote a long twitter thread that goes into more detail on how this was made: https://x.com/shijith/status/1879145563234648564 https://x.com/shijith/status/1879145563234648564 If you have any questions or feedback, do let me know. Thanks! -shijith

ksynwa 2y ago
The Indian Express page should explicitly state that the comparison was done using AI. Maybe it's because I am on mobile but I don't see anything of that sort.
- shijithpk 2y ago
  i am writing about this on hacker news, have posted a twitter thread about it and also put up my code on Github. Nothing is being hidden here mate, dont know how much more transparent I can get :)
  - ksynwa 2y ago
    > dont know how much more transparent I can get A lot more by mentioning on the actual page that the main content is AI generated considering that the neither the GitHub repo nor the Twitter thread nor this thread are mentioned on the page which is meant for public consumption. There is a disclaimer for this on the desktop page. But when rendered on mobile it isn't there. :)
    - shijithpk 2y ago
      > There is a disclaimer for this on the desktop page. But when rendered on mobile it isn't there. Hmm, wonder why this guy chose to do it this way. Was it a design decision? Was it because of the tight space? We will never know.
      - ksynwa 2y ago
        Ah yes. Mobile web pages famous for not being able to fit in 58 characters. :)
        shijithpk 2y ago
        Because mobile design is all about fitting in text wherever you can, right? :)
        ksynwa 2y ago
        Absolutely. With one tenth of the effort that you put into bragging about throwing three documents at an LLM it is certainly doable. :)