Table of Contents

• Lobbyist-in-a-Box?

  • What You Need to Write Letters to Your Electeds

  • Sample Prompt: Letter about Public Education

  • Sample Prompt: Letter About Property Taxes

  • Advanced Tips and Tricks

    • For larger projects, think iteratively

    • Ask AI to ask you questions

    • Buy the new tool. Seriously.

• Coming Soon: LetterSwarm

Lobbyist-in-a-Box?

Back in my college years, I spent a summer working for a temp agency. My typing speed was (still is) insanely fast, and that happened to be a valuable skill in the years between desktop computing and the emergence of the Internet. One time, the agency placed me at what I later learned to be a political lobbyist service provider–our job was to write letters to elected officials on behalf of constituents. The company mailed these pre-written letters to targeted groups of voters with self-addressed stamped envelopes; all you needed to do (as the voter) was just sign the letter and drop it in the mail.

That day’s project: writing letters on behalf of bar and restaurant owners to lobby OSHA against the removal of cigarettes from bars and restaurants. I quit on Day 1. I remember being deeply discouraged by the real-world demonstration of how politics works, and how difficult it must be for the average citizen to say or do anything that actually breaks through the noise.

(Incidentally: their efforts worked; you’ll note that there is no OSHA regulation prohibiting smoking in the workplace at a Federal level.)

Fast-forward 30 years, and now AI can write these sorts of letters for you! It’s early days for AI and politics / political activism, but there’s already much you can do.

What You Need to Write Letters to Your Electeds

ChatGPT and Google Gemini may be the best-known “chatbot” AI systems on the market right now, but unless you work in tech you probably don’t realize that there are already well over 100 AI large language models on the market¹ . Some of these are very specialized and have been fine-tuned for specific uses, such as evaluating software code or generating text and images for digital ads.

We’re going to keep things simple to start, though. All you need is:

• Your LLM of choice (I’ve been using ChatGPT Pro for quite a while, but any general-purpose service will work).

• Contact information for your elected official(s).

• A prompt to enter into the LLM that will create the type of letter you want.

• A reason to lobby your elected official.

I can’t decide on your behalf what you care about, though if you’re looking for some ideas here in Kansas I might suggest public education or property taxes to start.

LLM tools can be shockingly good at what they do, as long as you understand their limitations. When you’re talking with another human, we intuitively make hundreds of assumptions about intent—not just from physical and visual cues but also contextual clues that may reach back through decades of experience and familiarity with the other people in the conversation. Current AI systems can generate quality content, but you have to explicitly provide them with context and specific instructions to achieve your goal.

Pedantic. Finicky. Anal-retentive chef. This is the energy you want to channel. But you also want to actually save time versus writing the letter yourself, so think in terms of what you want the outcome to look like and achieve.