Perplexity debuts an artificial intelligence-based election information center

AI search firm Perplexity is testing whether using AI to share key voting information is a good idea with a modern tool Election information center This announced on Friday. The center offers, among other things, AI-generated answers to voting questions and candidate summaries, and on November 5, Election Day, the company says it will track live vote counts using data from Associated Press.

Perplexity says voter information, which includes voting requirements, locations and hours, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group supports similar Google features.) And that election-related responses come from a “selected set of the most credible and informative sources.”

Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Plotnick confirmed this in an email to Edge that both AP and Democracy Works are official partners of the center. Plotnick detailed Perplexity’s origins:

We’ve selected domains that are unbiased and fact-checked, including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We are actively monitoring our systems to ensure we continue to prioritize these sources when responding to election-related inquiries.

The center provides detailed information about what’s on the ballot for any location you enter (for example, address or city). There are also tabs to monitor the presidential, U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives elections starting Tuesday, broken down by state, showing the percentage of votes counted and who is leading.

The AI ​​summaries when I clicked on the candidates had some errors, for example it didn’t mention that Robert F. Kennedy, who is on the ballot where I live, withdrew from the race. It also included a list of “Future Madam Potus” candidates, which, when clicked, led to the above summary of Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy, except for a few meme images that are not included in her normal summary.

Plotnick said the company is investigating why the summary did not mention Kennedy’s resignation. “Depending on your location, there will sometimes be candidates for entry,” Plotnick added, explaining why a Future Madame Potus ad may have appeared. (He doesn’t explain why he summed up Harris, but the future Mrs. Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate, according to Ballotpedia.)

The errors illustrate the challenge of using limited-accuracy generative AI for such a high-stakes apply case, and why other AI companies are shying away from it. ChatGPT, Meta AI and Google Gemini route questions about voter information to other resources such as canivote.org or Google Search. Microsoft’s Copilot simply refused to respond when I tried.