Among the thousands of candidates seeking election in Colombia’s parliamentary polls this month is an artificial intelligence avatar. Its creator hopes it will change the way Indigenous people in the country are represented, despite concerns of bias and access.
Gaitana — created by Carlos Redondo, and other members of the Zenú community —is the digital representation of two Indigenous candidates for Senate and congressional seats in the March 8 election. Named for a 16th-century revolutionary leader, Gaitana is depicted as a blue-skinned woman who is an environmentalist and animal rights advocate. The bot communicates in Spanish, and currently has more than 10,000 users.
Colombian law requires human candidates, so Redondo is competing for the Senate, and Alba Rincón, an anthropologist and sociologist from the Emberá Katío ethnic group, is running for the House of Representatives. On the ballot, though, they appear as IA, the Spanish acronym for artificial intelligence. If elected, Redondo and Rincón will occupy seats reserved for Indigenous people, and defer to the digital platform to seek consensus from their communities on all legislative matters, Redondo told Rest of World.
To build something like this from the jungle, as outsiders who were never part of the political establishment, feels like a miracle.”
“It’s a very powerful and beautiful tool — through a common manifesto proposals will be turned into bills, or adapted to reflect decisions made by the community,” the 40-year-old mechatronics engineer said. “To build something like this from the jungle, as outsiders who were never part of the political establishment, feels like a miracle.”
Gaitana’s roots are in the traditional cabildo — or council — that governs the Zenú community, which numbers around 300,000 people. The council liaises with the national government, and manages all local affairs by consensus, with every member involved in decision-making. About a year and a half ago, Redondo created a simple website to make it easier for people to ask questions, and get information. That evolved into Gaitana, which is built on the DeepSeek large language model, and adapted to “our worldview,” Redondo said.
To ensure transparency, the platform uses smart contracts on blockchain. An ethics committee of 15 community members, including engineers, sociologists, and psychologists, will ensure that if elected, the two representatives follow the collective mandate, Redondo said.
Worldwide, AI is increasingly a part of elections, largely in the form of deepfake videos and voice clones. Gaitana isn’t the first AI to run for election: A Danish political party adopted an AI chatbot as its figurehead, and said its policies would be derived from AI; in Britain, AI Steve, an avatar of businessman Steve Endacott, appeared on the ballot. Neither won. Albania last year created Diella, the world’s first virtual official, which was recently sued by the actor whom the avatar was modeled on.
With Gaitana, there is little clarity on how consensus is reached, how it will be governed, and what AI’s role is, Pilar Sáenz, a Colombian technology and human rights researcher, told Rest of World. There are also concerns around accessibility to the platform, and its potential for bias, she said.
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A poster promoting Gaitana, an AI generated political candidate claiming to more fairly represent Indigenous people in Colombia.
“Historically, Indigenous and rural communities in Colombia have had precarious internet access,” she said. “What kind of representation can exist through a tool that requires connectivity and not just basic, but advanced digital skills?”
As a digital platform, it is also vulnerable to attacks, data breaches, and manipulation, and the use of blockchain is another challenge, Sáenz said.
“Blockchain is not designed for voting,” she said. “To guarantee traceability, you need full identification, and that makes secret voting very difficult. It means proposals and votes could be publicly attributable. In sensitive contexts, that could pose risks such as profiling, surveillance, retaliation.”
Blockchain ensures anonymity, as each person, on registering, “becomes a token,” Redondo said. Everyone can see the actions of the token, but not the person’s name.
In some ways, Gaitana is a modern version of some older movements in Europe and Latin America that challenged the role of elected representatives, Alberto Fernandez Gibaja, head of digitalization and democracy at International Idea, an advocacy organization, told Rest of World. Most of those experiments failed; while some created online platforms for collective decisions, they were seldom more than a conduit for decisions by the party leadership, he said.
With Gaitana, using AI to “gather opinions, find consensus, and filter positions to a point where there is an agreement is a noble idea, but runs a lot of risks including questions about who controls the platform that compiles and filters decisions, and how much is really owned by the community,” said Fernandez Gibaja. Besides, no AI system has enough fluency in a minority language, he said.
No AI model has enough safeguards for a political process, either. “What happens if the AI system finds an agreement among people that is truly antidemocratic? Or goes against the interest of the community?” Fernandez Gibaja said. As is the case with most technologies, “it is likely the most engaged will participate, whereas the less engaged and those without access to technology will be left out.”
For Redondo, Gaitana is not a stunt; he hopes it can “revolutionize democracy worldwide.” Although he is aware that getting the 25,000 votes needed to secure the seats will not be easy.
There is a very real upside to using AI in the campaign. A Colombian presidential hopeful was shot last year while campaigning, and later died. This year, two candidates for Congress have been reported as missing days before the election. AI can help bypass some of these risks: A candidate in Belarus used an AI bot to avoid getting arrested, while Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan used deepfake videos to appeal to followers from prison, Fernandez Gibaja said.
“I think this is going to be the case in more places,” he said. “You can’t poison an AI candidate or make him fall out of a window.”
