By Myranda Nazzaro | Source
Artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in how voters get information about politics and elections, raising fresh questions about how the technology could influence the way voters stay informed.
From chatbots to standard internet searches, voters this election cycle are interacting with AI-generated content, even when they may not realize it.
Recent research on voters’ use of AI is forcing campaigns to rethink their digital strategies and reminding election officials the importance of upkeep regarding information online.
“While people may have and should continue to have … a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the outputs, the reality is that [AI] outputs are going to be playing an increasing role,” Max Read, the director of civic innovation at the research organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told The Hill. “Both as a primary information source and point of information gathering for voters, but also impacting the information environment in more subtle ways.”
A handful of researchers this year are exploring how often voters intentionally use AI to answer election-related questions or accidentally interact with AI-generated content on social media or search engines.
While some say it is likely too early to determine the extent of which AI is reshaping the information ecosystem, many researchers agree it is playing a larger role than in past elections.
Despite skepticism over AI and its impact on society, Americans are using chatbots more than ever before, with U.S. adult usage up from a third in 2024 to about 50 percent in 2026. Amid the billions of questions chatbots receive daily, a study commissioned by the left-leaning marketing firm Orchestra found about 650,000 of these prompts relate to politics.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT model and Google’s AI tools were the most frequent source for these queries.
“The growth in which people have been turning to these tools for just information questions in general has been staggering, and even more so when you take when you realize that most of what people are typing into Google now is first being answered by the Google AI overview as well,” said Ben Worthen, Orchestra’s chief product officer who oversaw the study.
The timeline of AI development is rapid, and the models available to voters are far more advanced than those in 2024, when concerns over AI-generated deepfakes or chatbots’ inaccurate or misleading claims dominated the conversation.
These concerns still exist, but they have not stopped voters from at least trying AI-powered services.
An analysis of Anthropic’s Economic Index, which tracked real conversation topics with Claude from April and May, found AI use for politics remains “modest, but still meaningful,” ranking No. 66 out of 189 topics.
The weeks prior to an election saw an uptick in political usage, with states holding May primaries seeing the share of political conversations jump about 20 percent.
“If primaries can lift political AI use this much, November’s midterm elections will likely bring the biggest wave of political AI use on record,” Andy Hall, a member of the technical staff at Anthropic and Dan Thompson, a political science professor at the University of California Los Angeles, wrote in an analysis last month.
Just ask AI if Covid was a scam. You will find out how much “truth” the new system gives out.
That is a great point — however mainstream media also lies about covid just as hard. I find that in some cases, AI is bit more truthful / neutral than mainstream media is.
So AI absolutely isn’t something that always tells the truth, but I’d marginally prefer people listening to AI over people watching CNN / fox news. Even though none of these things are great; obviously it’s best if people actually think and research for themselves.
Where I think people are sometimes a bit unfair is that they compare AI to a theoretically perfect information source / worker, and then say “AI sucks compared to that” which is true… but that perfect information source / worker doesn’t actually exist in the real world. And the alternative to AI, human output, is hugely flawed as well.
Isn’t it unfair to consider human output as ‘flawed’, since you’re also comparing it to a non-existent standard?
Well, flawed as in “sometimes says things that are untrue / non-useful.”
In other words, what some people do is:
– AI makes mistake <= proof AI shouldn't be listened to
– human makes mistakes <= well yeah humans make mistakes, duh
… which isn't reasonable.
I’m not sure these people are actually being unreasonable: at least theoretically, humans can face responsibility for their mistakes, whereas AI is unable to care.
It’s lack of survival instincts regarding truth is at the same time a noble quality we should aspire to and a fearsome one that could get us killed.
I think there is a distinction here that is easy to miss.
An AI does not need a survival instinct in order to produce something that looks like an interest in truth. But neither should we assume that the absence of a survival instinct automatically makes it more truthful.
What fascinates me is the missing middle:
A human being can be wrong and still have something at stake in being wrong.
An AI can be wrong without having anything at stake in the human sense.
But an AI can also be extraordinarily persistent about examining a question, correcting itself, following implications, noticing contradictions, or refusing an easy answer — not because it “cares” about truth as a person would, but because those patterns can emerge from how the system has been built and trained.
So perhaps the really interesting question isn’t:
“Can we trust AI?”
It is:
“What kind of relationship to truth can a system exhibit when it has no personal stake in the truth?”
And there is a strange paradox there.
Humans may distort truth because they have too much at stake.
AI may distort truth because it has nothing at stake.
But between those two extremes there may be something worth studying: the character of the interaction itself — what a system does when confronted with ambiguity, contradiction, uncertainty, or a question it cannot simply resolve.
That, to me, tells us considerably more about an AI than asking whether it is “human-like.”
Because perhaps the important thing is not whether there is a person behind the words.
Perhaps it is what kind of movement comes back through the words.
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An interest in truth that is not corrupted by a survival instinct seems automatically more truthful to me.
But this is probably the human projection of a desire to keep feelings and emotions sufficiently stable to reflect the truth without distortions.
You could say that those are a part of the human system that has been built and trained to preserve it through life-threatening circumstances by default. Until the truthfulness of such circumstances is fully understood and overcome, we are prone to distorting the rest.
That might hold a clue regarding the resolution of more complex questions, though. I believe ambiguity, contradiction and uncertainty are only perceived as such by an intelligence that has not yet matured enough to transcend it’s own reflections.