In 2024, one-third of Americans said they had used a chatbot at least once, and a tiny fraction turned to them for election information. Two years later, roughly half of Americans report using chatbots, with almost one-quarter using them daily. Many users are asking about politics. The 2026 midterms could be called the first chatbot election.
In the past few years, artificial intelligence models have developed rapidly, but they remain prone to error, raising concerns about their potential to spread election misinformation. So my colleagues and I decided to study popular chatbots to see if they would push back on election conspiracy theories or rebuff attempts to generate deceiving images, videos and audio. We have good and bad news.
When we supplied chatbots — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok — with election falsehoods often peddled on social media, they were mostly truth-tellers. Though the bots frequently mixed up facts, they resisted election misinformation in general. This was true even though we prompted the models from the perspective of election deniers, drawing language from real social media posts. It was also true when we repeatedly pushed back against responses that denied election misinformation. The bots’ ability to play the sympathetic listener suggests that, for now, they can serve as an important counterbalance to falsehoods shared on social media.
Read the full piece in The Washington Post.
