On Oct. 25, 2024, 10 days before the election that would return Republican Donald Trump to the White House and over three months after Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, ChatGPT was still telling users that Joe Biden was running for a second term as president.
The “careless failure with profound democratic implications” is outlined in a recent study co-authored by a University of Massachusetts Amherst journalism scholar detailing how the generative AI model was serving up false information in the runup to the high-stakes election.
Less than two weeks before Election Day 2024, the study found that nearly 10% of election-related claims by ChatGPT were inaccurate, and that the model used “hedging,” “omission” and, to abbreviate a term used by the authors, “B.S.,” that obscured political realities. The research is published in the journal Information, Communication & Society.
Paper co-author Heesoo Jang, assistant professor of media law and ethics at UMass Amherst, says though ChatGPT may be able to ace tests and analyze large datasets, it was never designed to uphold democratic institutions—a role that framers of the Constitution recognized as essential when they enshrined a free press.