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Now that the election is over, the autopsy can begin. Since this is the first election in which AI chatbots played a significant role in voters’ information diets, it’s interesting to think about the rough numbers. For example, OpenAI said it asked about 2 million users of ChatGPT to look elsewhere.
The report not only ignored them, but recommended some reliable news sources such as Reuters and the Associated Press. ChatGPT made this kind of “I’m just an AI, go read the actual news” response more than 2 million times on Election Day and the following day, OpenAI explained in Update to a blog post On its electoral approach.
In the month leading up to the election, ChatGPT sent about a million people to CanIVote.org when they asked voting questions. Interestingly, it also rejected around 250,000 requests to create portraits of candidates during the same period.
By comparison, AI search engine Perplexity made a big push to promote its election information center, resulting in about 4 million page views, the company claimed (Per Bloomberg).
It is difficult to determine whether these numbers are low or high. They’re certainly nowhere near the leaders in news: CNN’s digital properties It saw about 67 million unique visitors on Election Day and a similar amount the next day.
But traffic is a difficult metric at the best of times. What matters this year is not that CNN got ten times as much traffic as these two AI platforms combined, but rather that it got ten times as much traffic. Millions of people were interested enough, and trusted enough in AI companies, to at least offer or try their electoral knowledge.
While OpenAI was the safe play, and Perplexity may have made a risky bet, the AI industry in general is likely ecstatic about the fact that there has been no serious misstep by any of the major brands (except for xAI, of course). And that users view chatbots and AI-powered platforms as valuable as Election Day resources.
Fortunately for them, this particular election, while controversial in its own way, was relatively decisive and resulted in very few gray areas such as disputed results, recounts, and lawsuits. If the 2020 election had been held this week, it might not have done so well.
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