Earlier this year, the Fontys ICT incubator programme had already attracted a lot of attention and achieved success with its AI approach to Who is the Mole? Now another imaginative initiative is emerging. On a website, three recently graduated students together with current ICT students have linked all election programmes of all parties and all important themes. And from that, AI-generated coalition agreements roll out.
In all honesty, the idea actually came from RTL, which remarked while recording the previous project that they could also apply AI to the coalition agreement. And let that exactly match what three former students were already doing with their own company, OpenMaze, commissioned by the Eindhoven municipality.
Max van Hattum: ‘We were working on a kind of election guide for Eindhoven. In which people could ‘talk back’ against motions that were tabled. We found out that it's actually much more fun to do that not with motions but with election programmes.’ And so Max, Niek van Dam and Ruben Fricke decided to work on coalition agreements together with students from the incubator programme - coached by Frans Mouws, just like in Wie is de Mol?
Validated
‘AI here only works with validated sources,’ Max explains. Which is quite often a problem with anything to do with artificial intelligence. Not so here. ‘Only the data from the election programmes were entered,’ he says. Incidentally, the club of students and former students is not so much about a ready-made coalition agreement. ‘Nor is it just about the current coalition partners. What we mainly want to show is that AI can be very supportive and that it shows what is possible and what is not.’
The tool, or website as you want to call it, therefore does not predict the outcome of the current negotiations of PVV, BBB, NSC and VVD. Ruben: ‘It's more: what is a coalition agreement likely to look like. And then you see that there are many options and that AI can predict a lot. What eventually rolls out in practice may not be ideal. But you also see that coming back to us.’
Concessions
Incidentally, the company is also brooding on expanding the data to arrive at even more accurate outcomes. Max: ‘You can also let AI monitor the news, so you can also add concessions on certain positions. After all, the more data the more concrete the predictions become.’
The inventors are now particularly curious to see what users will do with this and how experts view it. In any case, this tool already has one advantage: the sections from the election programmes have been stripped of jargon and converted into language that everyone can understand. Moreover, the sections and thus positions are easier to find. Max: ‘And context is obviously very important. To give an example: in both a coalition with PVV and one with PvdA-GroenLinks, asylum and immigration is an issue. Only with one the emphasis is on containment and with the other on solidarity.’
Source: Bron.nl