Perplexity Unveils AI-Powered Election Information Hub

Artificial intelligence company Perplexity is testing whether it’s worth using artificial intelligence to provide important voting information with a new Election Information Center This announced on Friday. The hub offers things like AI-generated answers to voting questions and candidate summaries, and on Nov. 5, Election Day, the company says it will track vote counts in real time using data from Associated Press.

Perplexity says its voter information, including voting requirements, location and time, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group provides similar functionality to Google). And that its election-related responses come from a “carefully selected selection of the most credible and informative sources.”

Perplexity spokeswoman Sarah Plotnick confirmed this in an email Edge that both AP and Democracy Works are official partners of the hub. Plotnik elaborated on the sources of Perplexity:

We’ve selected nonpartisan, fact-checked stories including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We actively monitor our systems to ensure we continue to prioritize these sources when responding to election-related requests.

The Hub provides detailed information about what’s included in the ballot for any location you enter (such as an address or city). There are also tabs to watch the presidential, U.S. Senate and U.S. House elections that begin Tuesday, with a state-by-state breakdown showing the percentage of votes counted and who is leading.

The AI ​​summaries when I clicked on the candidates had some errors, such as not mentioning that Robert F. Kennedy, who is on the ballot where I live, had dropped out of the race. It also listed a “future Madame Potus” candidate, which, when clicked, took me to the above summary of Vice Presidential candidacy Kamala Harris, minus some meme images that aren’t on her regular resume.

Plotnik said the company is looking into why Kennedy’s refusal was not mentioned on the resume. “Depending on your location, write-in candidates will sometimes appear,” Plotnik added, explaining why a list of future Madame Potus might appear. (This doesn’t explain why he summed up Harris, but the future Madame Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate. according to Ballotpedia.)

The mistakes illustrate the difficulty of using generative AI with limited precision for such a high-stakes use case and why other AI companies are shying away from it. ChatGPT, Meta AI and Google Gemini redirect questions about voter information to other resources such as canivote.org or Google search. When I tried, the Microsoft co-pilot simply refused to respond.