Robot's mayoral race: AI candidate gets thousands of votes in Japanese city

"Policies for the future" and a promise to lead the next generation were among the electoral pledges the artificially intelligent candidate, who went by the name Michihito Matsuda, said it would implement. "Artificial intelligence will change Tama City," Matsuda's campaign slogan read and the claim clearly struck a chord with many residents as the robot garnered 4,000 votes in the race. However, Matsuda finished in third place in the election, which was comfortably won by the incumbent Hiroyuki Abe, NHK reports. Matsuda was the face of the campaign but the human brains behind the operation were high powered Japanese businessmen Tetsuzo Matsumoto, the vice president of Softbank, and Norio Murakami, former Google Japan representative, Otaquest reports. Despite these tech-savvy connections a robot identical to Matsuda's is still available for purchase online and the candidate's official website was pretty poorly designed and contained apparent coding errors.