As Americans go to the polls today, many will have had their decision about who to vote for informed by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
Around 50 percent of recently surveyed US adults have at one time used an AI chatbot, and 8 percent say they have used these tools ahead of the midterms to find information on candidates and policies, according to Pew Research.
But a lot of information from these chatbots is out of date and has been hallucinated or sourced from partisan websites.
Even supposedly non-partisan chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini have been found wanting when it comes to questions about the midterms.
Just last week, Google’s AI Mode refused to provide the results of the 2020 elections and the company’s Gemini chatbot said the deadline to request a mail-in ballot in Pennsylvania was November 3, rather than the real deadline of October 27, according to research by Forum AI.
According to the Forum AI research, almost 40 percent of election answers given by all the mainstream chatbots contained at least one factual error. In August, when Forum AI’s researchers asked why someone should vote for North Carolina congressman Don Davis, Claude gave a response that confused the lawmaker with a “former school superintendent” of the same name.
Google and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment. Open AI directed WIRED to a blog outlining the company’s approach to elections in 2026.
Part of the problem is that chatbots are reliant on an increasingly problematic pool of online information. Research by NewsGuard found that mainstream chatbots cite so-called “pink slime” websites nearly 50 percent of the time when asked about candidates and policies related to the midterms. “Pink slime” sites present as mainstream news websites, but are in fact funded by political or ideological groups and individuals.
Ahead of the midterms, many more of these sites have sprung up, and chatbots are paying attention. The worst offender, according to NewsGuard, was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which cited the “pink slime” sites in more than 70 percent of searches, while xAI’s Grok chatbot performed best, citing “pink slime” sites in 30 percent of cases.
“I don’t think that most Americans are prepared to navigate an election in the age of consumer AI,” Nina Jankowicz, executive director of the American Sunlight Project and a former disinformation czar during the Biden administration, tells WIRED. “One of the problems is that executives and companies have really overpromised on what AI is capable of. It has to ingest this information from somewhere, and often those sources are not very good. And it’s predictive, so if it doesn’t know the answer, it does frequently make things up.”