Errors in voter guides
With US midterms approaching, the quality of political information produced by AI chatbots is under scrutiny again. According to the Washington Post, ChatGPT added a Senate seat that is not up for re-election to a voter guide it generated for a Missouri resident. In a similar test for Wyoming, local municipal candidates were presented as running for federal seats.
3,000 guides reviewed
The newspaper examined 3,000 AI-generated voter guides in total. Many of the false claims traced back to other AI-generated websites, meaning the bots were treating their own flawed output as a source and presenting it with confidence.
Weak address-to-district matching
A striking finding was that the chatbots failed to identify which congressional district a given address falls in 48 percent of the time. Among those that did return an answer, 22 percent got it wrong.
Low usage, persistent risk
A late-October Pew Research Center survey found that just 8 percent of US voters say they have used tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini to look up ballot information. Even so, the risk of misinformation reaching voters remains.
