Now that the election is over, the dissection can begin. As this is the first election in which AI chatbots played a significant part of voters’ information diets, even approximate numbers are interesting to think about. For instance, OpenAI has stated that it told around 2 million users of ChatGPT to go look somewhere else.
It didn’t just give them a cold shoulder, but recommended some trusted news sources like Reuters and the Associated Press. ChatGPT gave this type of “I’m just an AI, go read the actual news” response over 2 million times on Election Day and the day after, OpenAI explained in an update to a blog post on its elections approach.
In the month leading up to election, ChatGPT sent around a million people to CanIVote.org when they asked questions specific to voting. And interestingly, it also rejected some 250,000 requests to generate images of the candidates over the same period.
For comparison, Perplexity, the AI search engine, made a major push to promote its own election information hub, resulting in some 4 million page views, the company claimed (per Bloomberg).
It’s difficult to say whether these numbers are low or high. Certainly they are nowhere near leaders in the news: CNN’s digital properties saw around 67 million unique visitors on Election Day and a similar amount the day after.
But traffic is a tricky metric at the best of times. What matters this year is not that CNN got 10 times the traffic as these two AI platforms put together, but that it got only 10 times the traffic. Millions of people were interested enough, and trusted AI companies enough, to at least ask or give their election knowledge a shot.
While OpenAI’s play was the safe one, and Perplexity may have pulled off a risky bet, the AI industry in general is probably ecstatic about the fact that there was no serious gaffe by any of the big brands (except xAI, of course) and that users considered these chatbots and AI-powered platforms valuable as Election Day resources.
Luckily for them, this particular election, though controversial in its own way, was relatively decisive and resulted in very few grey areas like disputed results, recounts, and lawsuits. If the 2020 election had occurred this week, they may not have fared so well.
