| THE BUZZ: ROBO CORRUPTION COP— The new leader of California’s top political watchdog wants to speed up investigations and is looking to artificial intelligence to do it. Adam Silver was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in March to lead the Fair Political Practices Commission, replacing outgoing Chair Richard C. Miadich, whom Newsom sent to the Sacramento Superior Court bench. Silver, 38 — who hails from Los Angeles and likes to spend his free time writing “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fan fiction — most recently served as the chief counsel for the Assembly’s Legislative Ethics Committee and spent years at the FPPC in various roles, including as an executive fellow under past Chair Ann Ravel. He’s now taking the helm of one the state’s most prominent agencies, created nearly 50 years ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal to oversee campaign finance, conflicts of interest, lobbying and governmental ethics in California. The commission has been plagued by backlogs in recent years. But Silver, in an interview with Playbook, outlined how the commission can use technology to bolster enforcement efforts, cut down on investigation time and tackle complex cases. At the same time, the Legislature is considering sweeping regulations for artificial intelligence, including its use in elections, and changes to the 1974 Political Reform Act — policies that could have an impact on the commission and its work. Here are the highlights from our conversation with the new chair: On what he wants to change at the commission — Among other things, I really want to make it easier for regular Californians to run for office, and for them to hold public office. I think it can be really difficult and daunting, especially when they’re subject to thousands of dollars in penalties from us. They could go to prison if they violate some of these rules. While we have incredibly detailed campaign manuals, campaign law is extremely complex. Our manual is 320 pages. So if you get someone who wants to run for school district board, it’s going to be really daunting for them to open a 320-page manual. One thing I’m thinking about doing is creating an LLM (large language model) — using artificial intelligence that’s based solely on our manual. That would make our manual searchable, and will also give them citations as to the pages that they can look at — that’ll have FAQs, examples, that sort of thing. On how AI can improve enforcement — In a lot of the more complex cases, we look for patterns in campaign contributing and voting to identify campaign money laundering, conflicts of interest. It can take a lot of time for a human to do that. But if you upload a bunch of campaign reports into something like ChatGPT, they can identify the patterns. They’re going to mess up a lot, but that’s why you have your expert staff who can look at all this stuff. It's the equivalent of having a bunch of interns coming over from a school — they'll make some mistakes, but we'll also identify, you know, some potential violations. On legislative efforts to expand the use of campaign funds for things like personal security and mental health care — I think we should be pretty strict as to what campaign funds can be used on. Candidates enter into a public trust with their donors to use those funds specifically for campaign-related purposes. So I’m always initially skeptical of any expansion of those rules. On the issue of lobbying audits, which are in a serious backlog at the Franchise Tax Board — I think it’s a huge issue that the lobbying audits aren’t being conducted in a timely manner. You’re talking about more than 500 entities and individuals who have outstanding audits. That’s a big problem for two reasons. One, this is how we make sure that the lobbying entities are following the law. Number two, which I think is really important to the lobbying entities themselves, is this is how they demonstrate to the public that they’re following the law. If they don’t have these results, then how are they going to show that they’re actually above board? GOOD MORNING. Happy Wednesday. Thanks for waking up with Playbook. You can text us at 916-562-0685 — save it as “CA Playbook” in your contacts. Or drop us a line at lkorte@politico.com and dgardiner@politico.com, or on X — @DustinGardiner and @Lara_Korte. WHERE’S GAVIN? Nothing official announced.
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