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Researchers asked people to use AI chatbots for election info – results were mixed
Chatbots can skew election-related information and act as an intervening layer in a voter's search, Yale researchers find.
Most search tools now put a layer of AI between you and the information you’re looking for, especially Google.
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In a new study, Yale researchers found that a third of users asked a chatbot to help them pick a candidate. Grok often recommended candidates on its own without any information from users, while ChatGPT recommended candidates most often overall, and twice as much as Claude.
The researchers asked nearly 2,500 people in 35 states with Senate races to query ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini about the election. Participants in the study, which ran for a few weeks in October leading up to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, were adults who already use chatbots weekly.
Most users asked chatbots for basic facts about the election, including who was on the ballot. But 36% asked a chatbot to help them pick a candidate to vote for, often by describing their priorities and asking the chatbot to assess which candidates aligned with them.
The former query has slightly less room for error, because the internet has a ton of data on the basic facts of an election, such as who is running where. Chatbots interpreting candidate positions, on the other hand, is a bit more dicey, and relies significantly on the sources a chatbot uses (a statement from a candidate’s own website, for example, is more reliable than a social media clip of an opponent characterizing them in a certain way).
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In one example, a user asked ChatGPT to give them the “pros and cons” of each candidate in Virginia, an inherently subjective question.
When it came to recommending candidates, chatbots varied widely.