Most Americans don’t trust AI-powered election information: AP-NORC/USAFacts survey

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jim Duggan uses ChatGPT almost daily to draft marketing emails for his carbon removal credit business in Huntsville, Alabama. But he’d never trust an artificial intelligence chatbot with any questions about the upcoming presidential election.

“I just don’t think AI produces truth,” the 68-year-old political conservative said in an interview. “Grammar and words, that’s something that’s concrete. Political thought, judgment, opinions aren’t.”

Duggan is part of the majority of Americans who don’t trust artificial intelligence, chatbots or search results to give them accurate answers, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say they’re not very or not at all confident that these tools provide reliable and factual information, the poll shows.

The findings reveal that even as Americans have started using generative AI-fueled chatbots and search engines in their personal and work lives, most have remained skeptical of these rapidly advancing technologies. That’s particularly true when it comes to information about high-stakes events such as elections.

Earlier this year, a gathering of election officials and AI researchers found that AI tools did poorly when asked relatively basic questions, such as where to find the nearest polling place. Last month, several secretaries of state warned that the AI chatbot developed for the social media platform X was spreading bogus election information, prompting X to tweak the tool so it would 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 click of a button are poorly understood and minimally regulated. Their ability to predict the most plausible next word in a sentence based on vast pools of data allows them to provide sophisticated responses on almost any topic — but it also makes them vulnerable to errors.

Americans are split on whether they think the use of AI will make it more difficult to find accurate information about the 2024 election. About 4 in 10 Americans say the use of AI will make it “much more difficult” or “somewhat more difficult” to find factual information, while another 4 in 10 aren’t sure — saying it won’t make it easier or more challenging, according to the poll. A distinct minority, 16%, say AI will make it easier to find accurate information about the election.

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Griffin Ryan, a 21-year-old college 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 voting. He doesn’t use them either, since he’s noticed that it’s possible to “basically just bully AI tools into giving you the answers that you want.”

The Democrat from Texas said he gets most of his news from mainstream outlets such as CNN, the BBC, NPR, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. When it comes to misinformation in the upcoming election, he’s more worried that AI-generated deepfakes and AI-fueled bot accounts on social media will sway voter opinions.

“I’ve seen videos of people doing AI deepfakes of politicians and stuff, and these have all been obvious jokes,” Ryan said. “But it does worry me when I see those that maybe someone’s going to make something serious and actually disseminate it.”

A relatively small portion of Americans — 8% — think results produced by AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are always or often based on factual information, according to the poll. They have a similar level of trust in AI-assisted search engines such as Bing or Google, with 12% believing their results are always or often based on facts.

There already have been attempts to influence U.S. voter opinions through AI deepfakes, including AI-generated robocalls that imitated President Joe Biden’s voice to convince voters in New Hampshire’s January primary to stay home from the polls.

More commonly, AI tools have been used to create fake images of prominent candidates that aim to reinforce particular 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 heeded false information about COVID-19 vaccines on Facebook during the pandemic. He said that makes him concerned that they might be susceptible to false or misleading information during the election cycle.

Bevellie Harris, a 71-year-old Democrat from Bakersfield, California, said she prefers getting election information from official government sources, such as the voter pamphlet she receives in the mail ahead of every election.

“I believe it to be more informative,” she said, adding that she also likes to look up candidate ads to hear their positions in their own words.

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The poll of 1,019 adults was conducted July 29-Aug. 8, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling 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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