Perplexity is an AI-based search engine that sometimes makes mistakes, but it wants to prove that it can reliably provide information about election results.
Today, Perplexity announced a new section on its site dedicated to U.S. general election information. This section includes data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works and aims to help people understand important election issues.
Starting Tuesday, Perplexity will provide live updates on elections using information from The Associated Press. This will help users stay up-to-date on presidential, senate, and house races at both state and national levels. They also thanked Democracy Works for letting them use its Elections API, which helps power this new feature.
Perplexity hasn’t said whether it is paying The Associated Press and Democracy Works for their data.
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The election hub will answer questions about voting requirements, polling times, and give AI-generated summaries about ballot measures, candidates, policies, and endorsements. However, this hub mostly collects and presents info from the two partners, but it’s important to note that other companies have been hesitant to create similar features because of concerns over AI providing false information.
For instance, in OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search, users asking about election results are directed to The Associated Press and Reuters, while Anthropic’s Claude chatbot and Google’s Gemini don’t answer these questions at all.
It’s crucial for Perplexity’s hub to be accurate, especially since AI has had a poor track record in providing correct election-related information. A study from July showed that over a third of responses from popular AI chatbots to various election questions were wrong. Other research indicated that chatbots struggle even more with these topics when dealing with users who have disabilities or who speak languages other than English.
