People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms

yawpitch

To be fair, Americans have previously asked ouija boards, psychics, and the Magic 8-Ball the same question in the past… at least they’re not asking Grok. Yet .

jasbury

> Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. This sounds like it can be a really good thing. In an ideal world it’s a perfect use of LLMs. It helps make the ballot more approachable to people, and it can encourage more people to vote or help people vote less blindly. At the same time, it also relies on these tools being unbiased adjudicators. And over time I think there’s a greater risk of this straying from the truth.

Danox

Hopefully as a lark...

ThrowawayR2

And so it begins: the outsourcing of research, thinking, and reasoning to AI in lieu of using their own brains, an opaque AI in the hands of trillion dollar corporations with their own agendas and shareholders to please. In the future, maybe we won't need election analyses to predict political victories, we can just ask all of the major brand of AIs who a voter should choose and then multiply by the market share of each AI, dohohoho.

joshstrange

While there is potential for this to be a bad thing, I think on the whole it's positive. Most/many people don't interact with democracy at all or only "red vs blue" which means increasingly less the more local you get (IMHO). Instead, focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system. And maybe, just maybe, it will pull some of these dinosaurs out of the stone age and force them to put up a website with their views (crazy I'm saying this in 2026, it should have been table stakes decades ago). Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on. Your best bet is one of those "voter guides" that a local newspaper might put out and even those aren't great. Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

Zambyte

What's worse, a populatiom being uninformed, or homogeneously informed?

moezd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) So it begins...

bisonbear

IMO for an involved voter, this is actually a good thing. AI can both help you clearly define your priorities and policy preferences via an "interview", and can subsequently find candidates who's publicly stated positions, and past record, align most closely with your priorities. As always, AI can be used to completely outsource critical thinking, and doing so for elections is extremely concerning. However I would hope that more people use it to make better, more informed decisions, than to blindly choose candidates

metalman

This can only be illegal. Law, and all human rights and responsibilitys are built on the idea of humans making indipendent Judgments, free from any coersion or missleading information,, and so to allow giving voting advice from a machine with known, programed in, biases and inhibitory blocks is impossible, and could very quickly lead to total AI bans in many juristictions as there may be no reasonable way to monitor and certify such devices.

thrownaway561

Just vote for your party. cough Republican cough

chirau

Any guesses what Grok will be pushing people towards?

MattCruikshank

Is there a sci-fi novel yet, where everyone teaches their own AI how to correctly predict how they answer moral questions, and how they prioritize their principles? And then their AI actually represents them in Congress? Representative AI Democracy? (Yes, this is a potential Torment Nexus.)

colechristensen

The best way for these hosted LLMs to handle this is to follow the example of Tolkien's elves: > “The choice is yours: to go or wait.” > “And it is also said,” answered Frodo: “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.” > “Is it indeed?” laughed Gildor. “Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”

Imnimo

In general I think it's a good thing that people are trying to get more informed before voting, but I worry that if this becomes popular enough, there will be a lot of pressure on the labs to influence what the LLMs say about political questions.

vjvjvjvjghv

Maybe it's better than deciding based on TV ads.

pessimizer

So much worse than just voting the party slate like they're told, and operating from television commercials. Everybody should use ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms. They should ask for specific references to platforms and tweets, with links that they can follow. Could the information you get be horribly distorted? Yes. But no more than the information you're receiving from every other source - and with LLMs you can drill down until it runs out of alignment. The TV doesn't take questions.

Brendinooo

It's interesting; when I clicked I thought the angle would be "it's dangerous that we let chatbots influence people" but the article seemed to care more about the sycophancy angle: some form of "maybe it doesn't influence them enough"

tygon

While the knee-jerk reaction is to roll one's eyes, if it gets people that would otherwise not vote to be a bit educated and go out and make their voices heard, I am all for it. Yes, this has the potential for abuse and needs to be watched closely, but is this worse than the classic "I asked my coworker and..." type of non-involvement many already have? Not really and my hope is that people will only use it as a stepping stone to more research.

grebc

If you’re too lazy to think for yourself then it follows that you’d be too lazy to think about elections/voting.

0xEnsp1re

Everyone knows who Grok would recommend...