Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, can sometimes give you hallucinations. But the company wants to show it is reliable enough to be used to track election results.
Today, Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. It uses data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works, which the company describes on its blog as a “gateway to understanding important issues.”
“Starting Tuesday, we will be providing live election updates powered by Associated Press data, so you can stay informed about presidential, Senate and House elections at both the state and national level. ” Perplexity wrote. “Thank you Democracy Works for allowing us access to their elections API to power these experiences.”
Perplexity's Elections Hub answers election-related questions like voting requirements and voting hours, as well as AI-powered summary analysis of voting metrics and candidates (and their policy stances and support). Outline aside, the hub is essentially a wrapper around data from the Associated Press and Democracy Works APIs, but it's worth noting that Perplexity's rivals, fearing AI-generated misinformation, , being reluctant to release equivalent functionality.
In its recently released ChatGPT search experience, OpenAI says it is directing users with questions about the election results to The Associated Press and Reuters. Anthropic's Claude chatbot won't answer questions about election results, and neither will Google's Gemini.
Given AI's poor track record in this area, we can only hope that Perplexity's hub is as accurate as the company claims.
In a July study, the Center for Democracy and Technology found that in response to 77 different election-related questions, more than a third of the answers generated by AI chatbots, including Claude and Gemini, contained incorrect information. I discovered that. Other research has shown that leading chatbots perform even worse when asked questions about elections from people with accessibility issues or whose primary language is not English.