Through research, two European nonprofit organizations have discovered that Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) Bing chatbot, known as Copilot, generates erroneous/fake election information and improperly cites its sources.
AI Forensics and AlgorithmWatch published the study on December 15th, revealing that 30% of the time, Bing’s AI chatbot had incorrect responses to fundamental inquiries concerning political elections in Germany and Switzerland. Responses on candidate information, polls, controversies, and voting needed to be revised.
Moreover, it generated erroneous replies to inquiries about the 2024 United States presidential elections.
The study utilized Bing’s AI chatbot, as it was among the pioneering AI chatbots, to incorporate sources into its responses and assert that the inaccuracies are not unique to Bing. Reportedly, they performed initial assessments on Chat-GPT4 and identified inconsistencies as well.
The nonprofit organizations clarified that while the inaccurate information may have contributed to public confusion and misinformation, it has not impacted election outcomes.
“As generative AI becomes more widespread, this could affect one of the cornerstones of democracy: the access to reliable and transparent public information.”
Furthermore, the research revealed that the AI chatbot’s built-in safeguards were “unevenly” distributed, providing evasive responses 40% of the time.
A Wall Street Journal article cites Microsoft’s response to the findings as an indication of the company’s intention to rectify the concerns before the 2024 United States presidential elections. An advocate for Microsoft advised users to consistently verify the precision of the data retrieved from AI chatbots.
In October of this year, U.S. senators introduced a measure that would penalize developers of unauthorized artificial intelligence replicas of living or deceased humans.
As a precaution for the impending elections, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, prohibited political advertisers from using generative AI ad creation tools in November.
