Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, may hallucinate every so often. However the firm desires to indicate that it’s reliable sufficient to make use of for monitoring election outcomes.
Right this moment, Perplexity introduced a devoted hub for U.S. basic election data. Populated by knowledge from The Related Press and Democracy Works, the corporate described it in a weblog as “an entry point for understanding key issues.”
“Starting Tuesday, we’ll be offering live updates on elections by leveraging data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level,” Perplexity wrote. “Thank you to Democracy Works for granting us access to your Elections API to help power these experiences.”
Perplexity didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request about whether or not it’s compensating the AP and Democracy Works for that knowledge.
Perplexity’s election hub solutions election-related questions like voting necessities and ballot instances, in addition to AI-summarized analyses on poll measures, candidates, coverage stances, and endorsements. Apart from the summaries, the hub is actually a wrapper round knowledge from The Related Press and Democracy Works’ API — nevertheless it’s notable in that Perplexity’s rivals have proven a reluctance to launch comparable options for concern of AI-generated misinformation.
In its lately launched ChatGPT Search expertise, OpenAI is directing customers who ask about election outcomes to The Related Press and Reuters. Anthropic’s Claude chatbot received’t reply questions on election outcomes, and neither will Google’s Gemini.
We are able to solely hope that Perplexity’s hub is as correct as the corporate purports it to be, given AI’s poor observe document on this space.
In a July research, the Heart for Democracy and Expertise discovered that, in response to 77 completely different election-related queries, greater than a 3rd of solutions generated by AI chatbots together with Claude and Gemini included incorrect data. Different analysis has proven that main chatbots carry out even worse when requested questions on elections by folks with accessibility challenges and people whose main language isn’t English.
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