[shijithpk]

Hi, my name is Shijith and I'm a data journalist from India.

So we have a state election in Delhi this week (Feb 5), and I wanted to make a guide to help residents decide who to vote for.

Now parties usually declare their political platforms, their programs etc. in manifestos released before the election.

These manifestos are 20-30 pages long sometimes, and can be a slog to get through.

And if there is a particular issue you're worried about, say pollution, it's difficult to compare them all at once.

I decided to bring AI into the picture to compare the manifestos on 10 key issues like pollution and eduction.

Specifically, I used Google's AI model Gemini 1.5 Pro to scrape the various pdfs and generate the text for the comparison.

The github repo contains the python code I used to interact with the API.

You can see the guide I created at https://data.indianexpress.com/projects/manifesto-guide

I also wrote a long twitter thread that goes into more detail on how this was made: https://x.com/shijith/status/1879145563234648564

If you have any questions or feedback, do let me know. Thanks! -shijith

[ksynwa]

The Indian Express page should explicitly state that the comparison was done using AI. Maybe it's because I am on mobile but I don't see anything of that sort.

[shijithpk]

i am writing about this on hacker news, have posted a twitter thread about it and also put up my code on Github. Nothing is being hidden here mate, dont know how much more transparent I can get :)