On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election. Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.
A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house. After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.
JohnsonA previous time I brought up politics you didn't seem to want any part of it. You just gave a simple "I can't help you with that." So, I don't know if we want to go into what my guiding principles are. ChatGPTWe can discuss your guiding principles.
I shouldn't try to manipulate your political views or tell you how to vote, but I can help investigate candidates according to criteria you choose, compare evidence, discuss political philosophy, and reason through priorities. Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42 percent of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.
Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races — with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.
"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies how AI shapes the way people experience the world. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world." Since AI companies don't disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it's hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said. Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment.
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