Alejandra Salinas
Two candidates for Houston City Council for are waging a war over who used AI to create their list of campaign priorities.
Alejandra Salinas’ campaign website lists a series of priorities she would champion if elected to fill the council seat of Letitia Plummer, who is running for Harris County judge. Those priorities include quelching violent crime, honing in on everyday city services like on-time trash pickup and readying the city for potential floods.
Salinas, though, thinks her priority list is a little too similar to her opponent Dwight Boykin’s list.
Boykins’ website similarly lists the same priorities and solutions in the same order, prompting Salinas’ campaign to suspect AI-generated plagiarism, the campaign said in Wednesday news release.
“The last thing we need representing us on Houston City Council is an AI bot,” Salinas said in a statement.
Dwight Boykins
Boykins’ campaign wrote in a statement that Salinas’ campaign did not “hold propriety rights to A.I., which they clearly also used to draft their priority list.”
“This is simply an attempt to get name identification with voters, and distract from the momentum and overwhelming support Councilman Boykins continues to receive from all corners of Houston,” Boykins’ campaign said.
A representative for Salinas’ campaign said her priorities were published July 7. A represenative for Boykins’ campaign didn’t immediately say when his list went up.
It isn’t uncommon for candidates to have similar campaign priorities as they run for the same office. For example, both Mayor John Whitmire and the late Sheila Jackson Lee made addressing public safety a priority if elected, as well as creating more infrastructure to address flooding.
“Campaign concepts and ideologies are so hard to differentiate,” said Nancy Sims, a politics lecturer at the University of Houston.
While Sims acknowledged the two candidates’ priority lists were “unusually similar,” she said “everyone wants to fight crime and pick up the trash so it’s one of the harder areas, in my opinion, to challenge as stolen or copied.”
We agree that Salinas was first out of the gate – she was fundraising well ahead of CM Plummer’s announcement. Boykins was not far behind as a candidate, though that doesn’t mean his website was up in a similar time frame. That said, he has run and served before, so one presumes he has a list of campaign priorities set aside somewhere. If the accusation is that he copied her content then I’m not sure what AI has to do with it, but I’m happy to make it a villain anyway. The story goes into an issue-by-issue comparison, so read the rest and judge for yourself.