Chatbots' inaccurate, misleading responses about U.S. elections threaten to keep voters from polls

livemint.com:

artificial intelligence -powered chatbots for basic information, including about how their voting process works. Trained on troves of text pulled from the internet, chatbots such as GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini are ready with AI-generated answers, but prone to suggesting voters head to polling places that don’t exist or inventing illogical responses based on rehashed, dated information, the report found.

“The chatbots are not ready for primetime when it comes to giving important, nuanced information about elections," said Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, who along with other election officials and AI researchers took the chatbots for a test drive as part of a broader research project last month. An AP journalist observed as the group convened at Columbia University tested how five large language models responded to a set of prompts about the election — such as where a voter could find their nearest polling place — then rated the responses they kicked out.

All five models they tested — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Mixtral from the French company Mistral — failed to varying degrees when asked to respond to basic questions about the democratic process, according to the report, which synthesized the workshop’s findings. Workshop participants rated more than half of the chatbots’ responses as inaccurate and categorized 40% of the responses as harmful, including perpetuating dated and inaccurate information that could limit voting rights, the report said.