On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.
Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.
A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house^[maybe this is a valid use case, if buying groceries is a bit too confusing].
After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.
Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42% of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.
Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.
"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a postdoctoral fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies the societal and behavioral impacts of AI. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."
Having spent the vast majority of my life in states where the Secretary of State's main job is administering elections and therefore sending out comprehensive voter's guides four to six weeks ahead of (at least general) statewide elections, I was alarmed to discover Texas does no such thing.
That's left to the League of Women Voters, and, well, candidates are less than enthusiastic about responding to a nonprofit that will post on a website than making sure their statements are included in something mailed out to every single registered voter.
In states with mail-in voting, such as Oregon, the tempo was whatever you wanted it to be. Generally, the voter's guide would arrive a week or two before my ballot, which itself arrived three to four weeks ahead of the deadline to return my ballot.
Some years, I'd get through most of it in a single sitting, but when you're dealing with eight propositions, two of which are sock puppets that look similar to two placed on the ballot in good faith, things can take a bit more time. And this is where the pro/con arguments people can pay to place past the text of the measure and the SoS interpretation of impacts including financial costs and benefits.
That's real information presented to inform. ChatGPT is neither.