Virtual citizen

A Chinese woman seemed to have fooled the country by pretending to be a Filipino and winning an election.

Alice Guo or Guo Hua Ping, who has lived in the Philippines for 20 years since she was a teenager and fluently speaks the local language, is suspected of fraudulently obtaining spurious documents that enabled her to register as a Filipino citizen and run for mayor of Bamban town in Tarlac in the 2022 elections, which she won.

Amid the controversy about her questionable identity, the Ombudsman stripped Guo of her position as mayor for allegedly allowing an IT company owned by Chinese nationals to conduct a scamming operation using an offshore gaming license as a front, in a complex built on land that she owned.

Guo fled the country as police were hunting her down for prosecution, while the complex has been closed and lawmakers continue to gather evidence of her alleged fraud and illegal activities.

The fake mayor may not be the only one of her kind. A librarian running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA touted efficient governance using artificial intelligence (AI).

Victor Miller, 42, is pitted against five other candidates. His pitch to voters is that Vic will run the city, process hundreds of pages of municipal minutiae, and sign or veto legislation, Fox News reports.

Miller was not referring to himself but to Virtual Integrated Citizen, an AI bot he developed using ChatGPT, a chatbot and virtual assistant of OpenAI.

When Miller introduced Vic in a meet-and-greet, he had the bot, operated off his Mac mini and iPad, answer questions from the audience.

Fearing the adverse implications of a ChatGPT bot becoming mayor, OpenAI cancelled Miller’s account to disable his access to Vic. But the candidate opened a new ChatGPT account and built a second Vic bot.