Many Americans heading to the polls have already let an artificial intelligence chatbot decide who to vote for.
Recent surveys by Pew Research show around 50 percent of US adults have used an AI chatbot at some point. Eight percent say they used these tools to find information on candidates and policies ahead of the midterms.
Most of the information these chatbots provide is out of date. They frequently hallucinate or pull answers from partisan websites.
Even supposedly non-partisan chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini have failed on questions about the midterms.
Just last week, Google’s AI Mode refused to provide the results of the 2020 elections. 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. This came from research by Forum AI.
According to Forum AI, almost 40 percent of election answers from all mainstream chatbots contained at least one factual error. In August, when 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.
Chatbots rely 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. These sites present as mainstream news websites, but are funded by political or ideological groups and individuals.
More of these sites have sprung up ahead of the midterms, 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. 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.”
What it means
People making decisions about their vote cannot trust AI chatbots to be accurate. The tools cite dubious sources and invent facts. Voters should check information on official websites or trusted news outlets instead.
