Now that the election is over, the dissection can begin. Since this is the first election in which AI chatbots have played a significant role in voters’ information diet, even coarse numbers are fascinating to consider. For example, OpenAI said it had recommended about 2 million ChatGPT users to look elsewhere.
Not only was this met with a lukewarm response to them, but it also recommended certain trusted news sources such as Reuters and the Associated Press. ChatGPT gave this type of “I’m just an AI, go read the news” response more than 2 million times on Election Day and the day after, OpenAI explained in blog post update about your approach to elections.
In the month leading up to the election, ChatGPT sent approximately one million people to CanIVote.org asking questions about voting. Interestingly, it also rejected approximately 250,000 requests to generate candidate photos during the same period.
By comparison, AI search engine Perplexity has made a huge effort to promote its own election information center, resulting in about 4 million views, the company claims (according to Bloomberg).
It’s difficult to say whether these numbers are low or high. They are certainly far from the leaders in news: CNN’s digital properties visited by approximately 67 million unique users on Election Day and a similar amount the next day.
However, at the best of times, traffic is a challenging indicator. What matters this year is not that CNN got 10x the traffic of these two AI platforms combined, but that it only got 10x the traffic. Millions of people were interested enough and trusted AI companies enough to at least ask or try to gain their own voting knowledge.
While OpenAI’s play was unthreatening and Perplexity may have taken a risky venture, the AI industry in general is probably delighted that none of the substantial brands made a major blunder (except xAI, of course) and that users found these chatbots and AI-powered platforms considered valuable as an election day resource.
Fortunately for them, this particular election, while controversial in its own way, was relatively decisive and resulted in very few gray areas such as disputed results, recounts, and lawsuits. If the 2020 elections had been held this week, they might not have fared so well.