Leading 2025 NYC mayor’s race candidate Andrew Cuomo faced fierce backlash from his rivals on Monday over his campaign, citing the AI software ChatGPT in a section of his housing plan released over the weekend.
Several mayoral contenders piled on the former governor following a story from the news site Hell Gate, which highlighted a section of his 29-page housing blueprint that references the use of ChatGPT in a footnote. The original version of the page, which has since been replaced with a corrected PDF, also included garbled words and nonsensical sentences, such as its title: “Appoint Rent Guidelines Board Members Who Will Make Decisions Bbjectively.” (sic)
Cuomo’s campaign spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, insisted that AI was not used to generate the housing plan, which promises to build and preserve 500,000 new units over the next decade. Rather, he said it was deployed to find a Gothamist article about where the various candidates stand on freezing the rent for stabilized tenants.
Azzopardi added that the typos in the RGB section of the plan were caused by issues with a voice-to-text app used by one of the plan’s drafters that didn’t get caught by proofreaders.
“Citing a footnote linking to a news article found by ChatGPT is not the same as using AI to craft a policy,” Azzopardi said in a statement. “Using AI for basic research and making grammatical or spelling mistakes is very relatable for most New Yorkers.”
Nonetheless, many of the Democrats running against Cuomo seized on the opportunity to paint the former governor as disinterested in working to address one of the city’s most pressing issues while also calling into question Cuomo’s central campaign argument that he is a strong manager.
Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens), who has recently been polling in second place behind Cuomo, contended that the former governor “doesn’t have the decency” to write his own housing plan amid the city’s historic housing crisis.
“This plan is half-baked, riddled with typos, incoherent, and most importantly fails to address the astronomical cost of living here in New York City,” Mamdani said in a statement.
City Comptroller Brad Lander similarly pounced, derisively saying that Cuomo would be a “ChatGPT mayor.”
“New Yorkers can look at it and they could know, do I want a mayor who put his housing plan in ChatGPT and who doesn’t want to actually do the work of building and preserving actually affordable housing?” Lander told reporters during a Monday morning news conference. He also slammed the plan itself for stating that Cuomo opposes building taller to add more apartments in low-rise areas of the city.
Lander’s predecessor as comptroller, Scott Stringer, released a gag graphic depicting “CuomoGPT,” a satirical exchange with a Cuomo AI chatbot.
“The faux model is trained on decades of dodges, deflections, and delusions of grandeur, all delivered in perfectly on-brand Cuomo style,” a release from Stringer’s campaign reads.
Azzopardi hit back at the barrage of attacks: “Candidates attempting to seize on this to distract from their own lack of credentials, vision, and electoral support are both transparent and sad.”
