How AI companies are reckoning with elections
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
The US is heading into its first presidential election since generative AI tools have gone mainstream. And the companies offering these tools — like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft — have each made announcements about how they plan to handle the months leading up to it.
This election season, we’ve already seen AI-generated images in ads and attempts to mislead voters with voice cloning. The potential harms from AI chatbots aren’t as visible in the public eye — yet, anyway. But chatbots are known to confidently provide made-up facts, including in responses to good-faith questions about basic voting information. In a high-stakes election, that could be disastrous.
One plausible solution is to try to avoid election-related queries altogether....