Japan’s upstart Path to Rebirth party announced on Tuesday that it will install an artificial intelligence system as its new leader after founder Shinji Ishimaru resigned following a crushing defeat in recent elections.

Party representative Koki Okumura, a 25-year-old doctoral student at Kyoto University who describes himself as “assistant to the new leader,” told reporters at a news conference in Tokyo:

“The new leader will be AI.”

Okumura, who recently won a party contest to succeed Ishimaru and will nominally serve as the party’s leader, said details of the AI have not yet been decided.

“When and how it will be implemented is still under consideration,” he said, explaining that the AI will not dictate members’ political activities but will handle internal decisions such as allocating party resources.

The Path to Rebirth party, founded in January by Ishimaru, a former mayor of a small city in western Japan, allows its members to set their own agendas and has no unified policy platform. Ishimaru surprised observers by coming second in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election through an aggressive online campaign, but stepped down after the party failed to secure any seats in this year’s upper house polls.

Despite the media buzz surrounding its AI leadership experiment, the party has so far struggled at the ballot box. All 42 of its candidates lost in the June Tokyo assembly election, and all 10 candidates who ran in July’s upper house vote were also defeated.