It’s not just you. The four main candidates for mayor of San Francisco can all sound the same.
You hear the similar buzzwords — safe streets, downtown revitalization, City Hall accountability — but it can be hard to see the daylight in policy differences between Mayor London Breed, Daniel Lurie, Mark Farrell, and Aaron Peskin.
Have no fear. Our mayor bot is here to help.
As part of our toolbox of AI bots helping you decipher the city’s budget, charter, and ballot propositions, we’re dropping our mayoral candidate bot to help readers understand the options as Election Day nears. The bot can help you spot the differences in how the leading candidates plan to address key issues, like the city’s economic recovery, housing crisis, and transportation concerns.
Like our other bots, the tool is imperfect. We trained it using each candidate’s statements from a variety of sources, including social media, campaign websites, debate transcripts, and questionnaires submitted to endorsing organizations. That means it can summarize their policy ideas, but it can’t analyze the viability or impact of their positions. The bot can also sometimes get answers wrong, can’t provide detailed biographical information on candidates, and won’t give opinions or instruct you on how to vote. If you have questions about the answers or want to check for accuracy, you can ask the bot to direct you to the primary source material.
Here are some sample questions you can ask the candidates using The Standard’s mayor bot:
- Why should you be mayor?
- What experience do you have that makes you the best choice to solve the city’s homelessness crisis?
- Would you clear homeless encampments?
- What is your plan to fix the city’s economy, especially in downtown?
- Do you support giving more money to the San Francisco Police Department?
- How would you combat income inequality in the city?
- What is your plan to make biking safer?
- How would you clean city streets?
- How would you prevent more political corruption?
We’re happy to hear your feedback at feedback@sfstandard.com.
Methodology: The Standard trained an algorithm on a set of sources related to each mayoral candidate to create the GPT tool. We selected data sources that provided statements from the candidates in their own words:
- The candidates’ answers to questionnaires sent to them by The Standard, GrowSF, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, the League of Pissed Off Voters, the Potrero Hill Democratic Club, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, and San Francisco Young Democrats
- All tweets (excluding replies and retweets) available on the X accounts of the candidates as of Sept. 26
- Policy statements from the candidates’ campaign websites
- All available published press releases from the offices of Supervisor Peskin, Mayor Breed, and former Mayor Farrell
- All available published newsletters sent to constituents from the office of Supervisor Peskin
- All available posts from London Breed and Mark Farrell’s Medium blogs
- Transcripts of the mayoral debates hosted by KTVU (June 12), KRON (June 17), KTVU / Stop Crime SF / ConnectedSF (July 8), and KQED (Sept. 19)
- Transcripts of the candidates’ statements at a forum hosted by ABC7, The Standard, and Kara Swisher on Oct. 1
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include additional detail on the sources used to train the algorithm.