Scott Wiener is taking down the chatbot he launched to mock congressional opponent Connie Chan after receiving backlash from Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers, acknowledging he “clearly missed the mark.”Wiener announced Friday that he was deactivating ConnieChan.ai and removing the billboard s promoting it, saying the controversy had overtaken the issues he wanted to highlight in the congressional race, according to Bay Area Reporter.“Throughout my career, I’ve never been afraid to push the envelope, which means taking risks, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes missing the mark,” Wiener stated. “That’s how we’ve delivered first-in-the-nation laws on housing, paid parental leave, mental health care, and AI safety: by taking on tough fights and refusing to accept the status quo.”Prior to his apology, Wiener stood by the chatbot, maintaining that the site was clearly labeled as parody and that “no reasonable person” would mistake it for an official Chan campaign platform. Just 20 hours earlier, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi criticized the bot, which was designed to mock SF Supervisor Connie Chan's positions on issues including housing, public transit, education, and San Francisco’s economic recovery.Pelosi, who has endorsed Chan, said the chatbot went beyond political satire after Chan’s campaign prompted it about her accent and citizenship and received responses that invoked racial and sexist stereotypes, as Politico reports. Pelosi said one response echoed “harmful racial tropes” associated with Trump-era birtherism.The letter Pelosi posted Thursday was also backed by Representative Zoe Lofgren, eight other Democratic women in Congress, San Francisco Supervisors Jackie Fielder and Chyanne Chen, and several local Democratic clubs.“Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi and the other signatories wrote. “We should not have to now fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths.”Chan’s campaign reportedly provided screenshots of the chatbot responding to questions about her accent and citizenship. In one response, the bot joked about Chan’s San Francisco accent, while another made a reference to her citizenship status. According to the Chronicle, Hong Kong-born Chan immigrated to the US from Taiwan at age 13 and is a non-native English speaker.Wiener’s campaign denied designing the chatbot to produce racist or sexist responses, saying it was political satire focused on Chan’s record, accusing her of using race and gender to deflect criticismArellano said the chatbot was meant to lean into the “AI craze overtaking the city” while educating voters about Chan’s record.The Chronicle reports that Chan spokesperson Ian Krager accused Wiener of refusing to take responsibility for the chatbot’s responses.“Instead of apologizing or taking responsibility for his bigotry bot, Senator Wiener is blaming everyone else,” Krager said.The dispute has also raised questions about how effectively AI chatbots can be prevented from reproducing stereotypes. Valentin Hofmann, an assistant professor at the University of Munich who has researched racial prejudice in AI models, said chatbots can draw on stereotypes embedded in the vast amount of internet data used to train them.Hofmann told the Chronicle that accent-related stereotypes can be particularly difficult to remove because they can be encoded in subtle ways. After reviewing the responses provided by Chan’s campaign, he said the chatbot appeared to have picked up information about Chan’s background and used her accent in a failed attempt at satire.By the end of the week, the chatbot was reportedly no longer producing the responses that sparked the controversy. When asked about Chan’s accent or citizenship, it instead said it did not have information on those subjects.The controversy has also brought the candidates’ competing AI policies into focus. Chan recently released a video outlining proposals that include giving workers affected by AI a greater role in decisions about its use, requiring human oversight in areas such as finance and transportation, and requiring AI companies to cover the full energy and infrastructure costs associated with data centers.As the Chronicle reports, Chan has also said she supports a nationwide moratorium on new data center construction.Wiener has pointed to his own record on AI policy while defending the chatbot, including his unsuccessful 2024 effort to pass Senate Bill 1047, an AI safety bill opposed by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders that was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis also reposted Pelosi’s letter and called for the chatbot to be taken down, saying AI-generated impersonation has no place in politics.Wiener 's campaign received backing from a Super PAC funded by Anthropic, whose Claude chatbot powered the website.Previously: Scott Wiener Campaign Launches Connie Chan AI Chatbot, Highlighting Chan's Voting Record as SupervisorPhoto by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images ...read more read less