Some voters turn to AI in making election decisions

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Around the country, voters are choosing among political candidates on the Nov. 3 ballot, and some voters are turning to AI chatbots for information on candidates and who to vote for in the election.

Aron Culotta, a Tulane University computer science professor and AI expert, said researching candidates using an AI chatbot means that bot will go to the web for you to collect information and summarize it, which is different than using a search engine to find information on candidates yourself.

The issue, Culotta said, is that AI is not foolproof.

“The problems we’ve already been facing in terms of factual information around elections historically we still have today. And I think the challenge is that when you’re talking to one of these chatbots, they can seem more authoritative than a website that when you go to it, you realize it’s actually not that authoritative,” said Culotta.

FOX 8 interviewed citizens about the notion of people using AI to help them determine who to vote for in the election.

“I think that AI is wrong the majority of the time, and it’s not really somewhere where you should get the truth and find out information about politics or anything like that,” said Kyleigh Kaminski.

Another person weighed in on the topic in response to being asked if she thought AI was trustworthy when it comes to election information.

“As trustworthy of anybody you ask, I guess. I think it gets a lot of stuff wrong,” she said.

In 2024, the Associated Press reported on chatbots’ inaccurate and misleading responses about elections. Two years later, there is more reporting on the topic.

“Some of those errors are due to faulty information out there on the web, right? And some of them are also due to the chatbots sort of making things up or getting things incorrect. And I think this is a pervasive problem,” Culotta said.

FOX 8 asked Culotta his advice for someone thinking about asking AI for information on a candidate to help them decide on their vote.

“When I think about interacting with chatbots, with the image in my mind, I think of like a really precocious 12-year-old, like one of those 12-year-olds that graduated from Harvard, and they’re really book smart,” he said.” But when you’re interacting with them, you need to push back and say, ‘Show me your sources.’”

Culotta said some voters may be turning to AI to learn about candidates because they view it as a time saver.

“There’s a lot of things to vote on. And voters don’t have time to do in-depth research on every single issue. So I think there is a lot of value here to having these systems summarize sometimes very complex issues, right? So I think that’s what’s driving it: voters want to be engaged,” he said. “They want to know what they’re voting for. And it can be hard to parse that out in the normal ways.”

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