US elections: Over 2M ChatGPT users were redirected while Perplexity AI embraced live poll results

OpenAI also said that it had not observed any evidence of covert AI operations to influence the 2024 US presidential elections.

Most AI companies like Google and OpenAI took a cautious approach to the US elections.

The New York Times sued OpenAI in December last year. (File photo)

As the dust settles on Donald Trump’s presidential victory, OpenAI has revealed that an estimated two million users came to ChatGPT for poll results on Election Day and the day after.

However, they were redirected to trusted news sources such as Associated Press and Reuters, the AI startup said in an updated blog post on Friday, November 8.

“In the month leading up to the election, roughly 1 million ChatGPT responses directed people to CanIVote.org⁠,” the OpenAI blog post said.

Notably, OpenAI also revealed that ChatGPT “rejected over 250,000 requests to generate DALL·E images of President-elect Trump, Vice President Harris, Vice President-elect Vance, President Biden, and Governor Walz” in the month leading up to the widely watched presidential contest.

The company further said that it had not observed any evidence of sophisticated covert operations using its AI models to influence the 2024 US presidential elections.

Also Read | AI, misinformation and the 2024 US presidential elections

Most AI companies like Google and OpenAI took a cautious approach by implementing restrictions on their AI models to avoid answering poll result-related questions from users. However, Perplexity AI went in the opposite direction and launched its own election information hub to serve up real-time information on the results as they came in.

To avoid hallucination, the AI search startup reportedly put in place tight guardrails around information pertaining to election candidates, polling sites, etc. that had been sourced from a non-profit entity called Democracy Works, according to Wired.

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While the result trends and numbers shown in Perplexity’s hub were accurate, the report notes that looking up more information led to vague AI-generated answers. Perplexity claimed that its election information hub recorded over four million page views up till Wednesday, November 6.