“The 2026 midterms could be called the first chatbot election,” writes Lawrence Norden, vice president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
He means that the growing number of people who use chatbots daily are likely to ask their trusted LLMs about election decisions.
Norden tested a range of chatbots to see how they’d respond to election falsehoods and misinformation and found “they were mostly truth-tellers. Though the bots frequently mixed up facts, they resisted election misinformation in general.” They also did so sympathetically, suggesting chatbots could “serve as an important counterbalance to falsehoods shared on social media.”
With deepfakes, however, the news wasn’t so good. Chatbots were happy to produce false images, and couldn’t reliably tell whether images were real or AI-generated.
Norden argues that AI companies should be held accountable for chatbots doing harm, that chatbots should be able to read the watermarks that indicate AI-generated content, that companies must encourage third-party tests and evaluation, and that academics, journalists and election officials should keep producing “well-sourced information” to combat “merchants of disinformation learn[ing] to manipulate the bots.”
This all seems fine to me, but I do think Norden might not realize just how little control we have over even today’s AI tools. AI companies and lawmakers still haven’t figured out a way to ensure AI models don’t sometimes induce suicide and psychosis; I doubt they can, as Norden mandates, “make sure [AI’s impact on American democracy] does more good than harm.”
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.