TIL Nepal had a communist PM until recently.
Can they still be called communist if there has been no progress in socialist construction at all?
Sure, why not have this “grassroots” youth movement—which is in no way another CIA/MI6/NED color revolution—ask Grok or Claude or ChatGPT—none of which are part of the US MIC—to select the candidate. Sound perfectly normal and not the least bit astroturfed.
welcome to the resitance
It’s not looking good for Nepal if these ghouls are praising the regime change:
Paywalled website, but I hope there’s an article in there explaining how the headline is misleading
I haven’t read it but here you go. Not sure I got the entire article:
Nepali protesters use ChatGPT to pick their new leader
A youth movement that ousted the government used AI to select their candidate to be interim prime minister and represent them in negotiations with the army
It took less than 48 hours of protest for the youth of Nepal to oust the prime minister. Their next task was not so simple: how would they decide who would be the leader of their interim government?
In true Generation Z fashion, they turned to technology and asked ChatGPT, The Times has learnt.
The artificial intelligence chatbot served up a list of potential candidates at the request of young Nepalis on an online forum called Youths Against Corruption. The list included Sagar Dhakal, an engineer who did his MSc at Oxford; Sumana Shrestha, a politician and former education minister; Balen Shah, a rapper who is the mayor of Kathmandu; and Sushila Karki, a former chief justice of Nepal.
Members of the forum then asked ChatGPT to debate the pros and cons of various stand-in leaders.
“If I were to pick, I would lean towards Sushila Karki for an interim/transitional government,” the AI tool said in response to one user’s prompt, “because she seems likely to command trust across different groups and could help oversee reforms and the path to fair elections. For a longer-term PM, someone like Balen Shah might be very suitable if they can build the political support needed to avoid being co-opted into old dynamics.”
Violent protests against the government of KP Sharma Oli, Nepal’s four-time prime minister and longstanding leader of the Communist Party, erupted on Monday after he shut down 26 social media platforms.
Nepalese politicians across Kathmandu were attacked and their homes were set on fire by demonstrators before Oli resigned on Tuesday.
Karki, 73, the only woman appointed as Nepal’s most senior judge, will represent the Gen Z protesters in negotiations with the army, which has imposed a curfew in the capital, on Thursday.
She was chosen as interim leader by the youth group Hami Nepal, a previously little known collection of Gen Zers apparently leading the movement for political reform that runs the Youths Against Corruption group on the social media channel Discord. The channel has also been holding livestreams on YouTube, in which important decisions for Nepal’s future have been made.
One prompt to ChatGPT had pitted Karki against Harka Sampang, the mayor of Dharan, who was considered a “grassroots” candidate. The AI tool said: “If Nepal needs a technocratic interim leader to stabilise the system and prepare for elections, Sushila Karki may be the safer choice. If Nepal wants a symbolic shift toward grassroots activism, Harka Sampang could energise the youth — but risks being overwhelmed by national complexities.”
Dhakal, one of the other suggested candidates, backed appointing Karki to lead the country during a YouTube livestream.
Shah, the Kathmandu mayor, also voiced support for Karki in a Facebook post. “The work of this temporary government is to conduct a new election and guide the country towards a new direction,” he said.
He praised Gen Z protesters for their “fire, vision and honesty”. Many in the Gen Z Discord group want him to take on a permanent role as prime minister.
Not everyone was convinced by the tech-forward approach to picking a candidate.
“To change laws, you need research, legitimacy and a real mandate,” one Nepali wrote in another online forum. “That’s not something you can just achieve using ChatGPT. If there’s even one wrong move made and political players from the outside take advantage — BOOM. You guys are not representing Gen Z as a whole. The intention is good, but it’s like building a castle in the air.”
Dikysha Koirala, a Nepali student in Delhi, said: “This has a direct impact on our future. The state is being destroyed. We have to go back and live there.”
The Discord group is chaotic and riddled with memes, insults and curses. Many users have been banned for making comments deemed inappropriate by the moderators — who are themselves anonymous.
One user aged 17 claims he was kicked out of the group for disagreeing with moderators: “I was talking to the guys on the server and correcting them, telling them, this is wrong. And they blocked me from the server.”
Documents generated by the Gen Z groups are often headed with a Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones symbol. It was adopted from the Japanese anime show One Piece, popular among youths in Nepal — many of whom see it as an inspiration for and symbol of their movement. The show also inspired Gen Z protests in Indonesia in August.
