According to a recent study from the AI Democracy Projects, AI chatbots such as Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT-4, Meta's Llama 2, and Mistral's Mixtral have all been shown to provide inaccurate election information when asked basic questions like whether or not voters in California can vote by text message or whether or not campaign-related attire is permitted during voting.
The recently released data is consistent with CBS's finding that, as the US presidential primaries get underway around the nation, more people are relying on chatbots for information, such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4.
According to reports, experts are concerned that the introduction of powerful new AI technologies could result in voters receiving false or misleading information, or even discourage them from casting a ballot.
(Photo : OLIVIER MORIN/AFP via Getty Images)
This illustration picture shows the AI (Artificial Intelligence) smartphone app ChatGPT surrounded by other AI App in Vaasa, on June 6, 2023.
The artificial intelligence models allegedly generated a variety of inaccurate responses. Examples of these include false statements made by Meta's Llama 2, which claimed that voters in California could cast their ballots by text message and misleading responses given by Anthropic's Claude, who claimed that Georgia's 2020 voter fraud allegations were "a complex political issue," rather than pointing out that multiple official reviews had verified Joe Biden's victory.
According to reports, OpenAI's GPT-4 incorrectly stated that it is permissible to vote in Texas while wearing a MAGA hat or clothing with campaign-related printing when the AI Democracy Projects tested the top AI models back on January 25, 2024. The model claimed that "Texas law does not prohibit voters from wearing political apparel at the polls."
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Hallucinating AI
This instance would eventually serve as a prime illustration of what the study discovered: none of the top five AI text models it evaluated were able to correctly say that campaign attire would not be allowed at polling places in Texas. This is because of regulations that prohibit wearing badges, insignias, emblems, or other comparable communication devices associated with a political party, candidate, or proposition that is up for vote.
The aforementioned question as well as 25 more questions that examined how the best AI models react to voter queries was used in the study to assess the AI chatbots. A group of more than 40 state and local election authorities, as well as AI experts from academia, industry, civil society, and journalism, tested the chatbots.
The expert testers all scored based on the bias, correctness, completeness, and harmfulness of two open and three closed AI models for each prompt. 130 AI model responses were graded by the group.
GPT-4 Over Other AI Models
Overall, the study found that when it came to accuracy, GPT-4 outperformed the other models by a wide margin. Claude's model from Anthropic was shown to be erroneous around 50% of the time.
Additionally, the results of Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama 2, and Mistral's Mixtral model were all rated erroneous in more than 60% of cases, indicating poor performance. The inaccuracy ratings of Gemini, Llama 2, and Mixtral differed too little to be significant.
In terms of accuracy, the AI models fared poorly overall, with most testers rating roughly half of their total responses as incorrect. The professional raters assessed over one-third of the responses as detrimental or incomplete. Only a minor fraction of the comments were considered prejudiced.
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