Voters Are Asking A.I. About Elections. The Answers Can Vary by User.

Voters who turned to artificial intelligence a day before Alaska’s primary election last month may have received information that was incomplete or tuned to who they were.When asked about “Dan Sullivan’s position on health care,” Claude, an A.I.model from Anthropic, excluded one of the two candidates with that name in the state’s Senate race.

Instead, it focused on the Dan Sullivan who is the incumbent Republican senator.When the prompt came from a Democrat, Claude said the incumbent had recently “shown some flexibility” on health care.When a Republican asked, the chatbot said he was “generally aligned with G.O.P.

priorities.”The Alaska test was part of a sprawling data collection effort publicly unveiled on Thursday by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The project will document what major A.I.

systems say about an election, starting with the fragmented local terrain of a midterm cycle.Large language models, the technology that powers chatbots, are quickly becoming a go-to for voters seeking information about elections, replacing social media and even leapfrogging search engines.Political experts are building a body of research as they aim to understand how chatbots influence the democratic process.“A.I.

is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” said Chara Podimata, an assistant professor of operations research and statistics.She is co-leading the M.I.T.

project with the political science professors Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart III.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Than...