For former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the release of his housing plan on Sunday was to be a major policy moment in his campaign to become mayor of New York City, which is facing its worst housing crunch in more than 50 years.
He spoke about it at a Sunday morning church service; promised to build and preserve 500,000 units of housing, most of them “affordable”; and prominently noted his years working as housing secretary for the Clinton administration.
But the impact of his plan was diluted by a distinctly 21st-century imbroglio, one involving artificial intelligence, voice-to-text software and questionable proofreading skills.
The 29-page housing plan included incoherent babble and a ChatGPT-derived hyperlink to a news article, as was first reported by Hell Gate, a local news site.
The episode, in its apparent carelessness, fueled criticism of Mr. Cuomo, who, despite having quickly accumulated more than $1.5 million in fund-raising dollars, has limited his media availability and allowed his campaign to rest heavily on name recognition.
“I did the hard work to pass city laws that will create 120,000 new housing units,” Adrienne Adams, the New York City Council speaker who is among eight prominent Democrats challenging Mr. Cuomo in the mayoral primary, wrote on social media. “Andrew Cuomo asked ChatGPT what his housing policy should be. Guess someone does need on-the-job training.”
The Cuomo campaign said the policy paper was written by Paul Francis, a policy adviser who previously served as budget director for Gov. Eliot Spitzer, director of state operations for Gov. David Paterson and director of agency redesign and efficiency for Mr. Cuomo. Mr. Francis had his left arm amputated in 2012, and in an interview on Monday said that he relied on voice recognition software. That, he said, explains the several instances of incoherent language in the policy brief.
“It’s very hard to type with one hand,” he said. “So I dictate, and what happens when you dictate is that sometimes things get garbled. And try as I might to see them when I proofread, sometimes they get by me.”
Mr. Francis acknowledged using ChatGPT to do research, much as people use Google, he said. The fact that the “ChatGPT” reference in the paper is contained in a link to an article by Gothamist merely demonstrates that he would never use artificial intelligence for research without checking the citations, he said.
“It clearly was not a writing tool; it was a research tool,” Mr. Francis said.
Among the virtually incomprehensible passages was this one:
“Nevertheless, several candidates for mayor this year have either called directly for a rent increase or for other measures that would tilt the scale toward lower rent increases. This is a politically convenient posture, but to be in. Victory if landlords — small landlords in particular — are simply unable to maintain their buildings.”
By Monday morning, that paragraph and two others had been edited, but the hyperlink containing the ChatGPT reference remained.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the Cuomo campaign, argued that the instances of muddled language indicate that the paper was not, in fact, written by artificial intelligence.
“If it was written by ChatGPT, we wouldn’t have had the errors,” Mr. Azzopardi said.
Housing is one of the primary issues animating the mayor’s race as New York City faces its worst housing crisis in more than half a century. In January, more than 120,000 New Yorkers slept in shelters, including more than 40,000 children, according to a tracker maintained by Coalition for the Homeless. Fully employed adults live in homeless shelters because they are unable to afford rent. Lotteries for the subsidized units that do get built attract thousands of applicants.
Mr. Cuomo’s housing strategy was of particular interest because of his background. While Mr. Cuomo presided as governor over the tightening of the housing market, he also created an organization to serve the homeless and chaired a mayoral commission on homelessness during David N. Dinkins’s administration.
Mr. Cuomo’s plan, called “Addressing New York’s Housing Crisis,” calls for building and preserving 500,000 units of housing over 10 years — a strategy similar to that proposed by the current mayor, Eric Adams, in 2022.
Mr. Cuomo said he would lean hard on tax incentives for developers, commit more funding to subsidize affordable housing, and invest pension funds into housing development.
