by WASHINGTON (AP) — Jim Duggan uses ChatGPT almost daily to compose marketing emails for his Huntsville, Alabama-based carbon credit company, but he would never trust an artificial intelligence chatbot with questions about the upcoming presidential election.
“I just don’t believe that AI produces truth,” the 68-year-old political conservative said in an interview. “Grammar and words are concrete. Political thought, judgment and opinions are not.”
Duggan is among the majority of Americans who don’t trust artificial intelligence, chatbots or search results to give them accurate answers, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say they are not very or not at all confident that these tools provide reliable and factual information, the poll shows.
The results show that although most Americans have already begun using chatbots and generative AI-based search engines in their personal and professional lives, they remain skeptical about these rapidly evolving technologies, especially when it comes to information about important events such as elections.
Earlier this year, a gathering of election officials and AI researchers found that AI tools performed poorly on relatively simple questions, such as where to find the nearest polling place. Last month, several secretaries of state warned that the AI chatbot developed for social media platform X was spreading false election information, prompting X to tweak the tool to first direct users to a federal government website for reliable information.
Large AI models that can generate text, images, videos or audio clips at the touch of a button are poorly understood and barely regulated. Their ability to predict the most plausible next word in a sentence based on huge pools of data enables them to provide sophisticated answers on almost any topic – but also makes them prone to error.
Americans are split on whether they believe the use of AI will make it harder to find accurate information about the 2024 election. About 4 in 10 Americans say the use of AI will make it “much harder” or “somewhat harder” to find factual information, while another 4 in 10 are unsure, saying it will make it neither easier nor harder, the poll found. A significant minority, 16%, say AI will make it easier to find accurate information about the election.
Griffin Ryan, a 21-year-old student at Tulane University in New Orleans, said he doesn’t know anyone on his campus who uses AI chatbots to find information about candidates or elections. He doesn’t use them himself, either, because he’s found it’s possible to “basically just force AI tools to give you the answers you want.”
The Texas Democrat said he gets most of his news from mainstream media outlets such as CNN, BBC, NPR, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. As for misinformation in the upcoming election, he is more concerned that AI-generated deepfakes and AI-controlled bot accounts on social media could influence voters’ opinions.
“I’ve seen videos of people making AI deepfakes of politicians and things like that, and they were all obvious hoaxes,” Ryan said. “But when I see those, I worry that maybe someone is doing something serious and actually spreading it.”
A relatively small portion of Americans – 8% – believe that the results of AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are always or often based on facts, the survey found. They have a similar level of trust in AI-powered search engines such as Bing or Google: 12% believe their results are always or often based on facts.
There have already been attempts to influence the opinion of US voters through AI-based deepfakes, including AI-generated robocalls that imitated the voice of President Joe Biden and were designed to persuade voters not to vote in the New Hampshire primary in January.
Even more commonly, AI tools are being used to create fake images of prominent candidates designed to reinforce certain negative narratives – from Vice President Kamala Harris in a communist uniform to former President Donald Trump in handcuffs.
Ryan, the Tulane student, said his family is fairly media literate, but he has some older relatives who heard false information about COVID-19 vaccines on Facebook during the pandemic. He said that makes him worry that they might be vulnerable to false or misleading information during the election cycle.
Bevellie Harris, a 71-year-old Democrat from Bakersfield, California, said she prefers to get her voting information from official government sources, such as the voter pamphlet she receives in the mail before each election.
“I think it’s more informative,” she said, adding that she also likes to look through candidates’ ads to hear their positions in their own words.
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The survey of 1,019 adults was conducted from July 29 to August 8, 2024, using a sample from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.
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Swenson reported from New York.
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