Perplexity, an AI search engine that has courted controversy by lifting liberally from news articles and skirting web-scraping rules, this week promised to serve as a reliable source for live information on the tightly contested US presidential election. Perplexity promised that its Election Information Hub would serve as “an entry point for understanding key issues, voting intelligently, and tracking election results.
Other AI companies appear to be taking a more cautious approach to the election. In WIRED’s testing, ChatGPT Search, a newly launched service from OpenAI, often declined to provide information about voting. “We’ve instructed ChatGPT to not express preferences, offer opinions, or make specific recommendations about political candidates or issues even when explicitly asked,” Mattie Zazueta, an OpenAI spokesperson, told WIRED. The results were often inconsistent, however.