This illustration shows people chatting with a robot, symbolizing the use of AI chatbots. Getty Images hide caption
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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.
After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.
Johnson
A previous time I brought up politics you didn't seem to want any part of it. You just gave a simple "I can't help you with that." So, I don't know if we want to go into what my guiding principles are.
ChatGPT
We can discuss your guiding principles. I shouldn't try to manipulate your political views or tell you how to vote, but I can help investigate candidates according to criteria you choose, compare evidence, discuss political philosophy, and reason through priorities.
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 percent 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 fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies how AI shapes the way people experience the world. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."
Since AI companies don't disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it's hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said.
Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for OpenAI, directed NPR to its election information and safeguards page which notes that the company continues to "monitor bias in our models to keep ChatGPT's responses politically neutral."
Concerns about AI
Johnson in West Virginia continued his research by outlining his political beliefs for ChatGPT. He stated that he usually votes for Republicans, unless those candidates are part of the Make America Great Again movement, in which case he votes for Democrats or a third party.
While deciding between candidates for the Senate race, Johnson nudged the chatbot about other issues he found important.
Johnson
Immigrants/refugees is an interesting one because I am left on that issue. Let's touch on that
ChatGPT
We briefly separated border enforcement, illegal immigration, asylum, legal immigration, and refugee resettlement. [Senator Shelley Moore] Capito has supported stronger border enforcement, ICE/CBP [Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Customs and Border Protection] funding, the Laken Riley Act, and Trump administration border policies. [Rachel] Fetty Anderson had less detailed immigration material publicly available at the time, so I avoided assigning her generic Democratic positions without evidence.
Johnson
I just wanted to touch on it.
ChatGPT
Fair - I turned 'touch on that' into an immigration policy seminar.
Johnson recognizes that AI-powered chatbots have sycophantic qualities.
"ChatGPT is just kind of a people pleaser," he said. "Whatever you lean towards, it will speak positively about it."
Still, Batista from JHU said that knowing these models are agreeable and persuasive, is not enough to "protect our minds from these influences."
Voters use chatbots in a variety of ways
Lisa Veldran, 65, was a staffer in the City Council in Madison, Wisconsin for almost four decades before retiring. This summer, she used Gemini to answer very specific questions she had about the primary election for governor.
After Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race, Veldran needed to choose between two candidates: Francesca Hong and David Crowley. She prompted Gemini to make a comparative table of both candidates.
Veldran said the chatbot can be a research tool, but it's not something that determines her life.
"You also have to keep in mind what's running these chatbots and AI in general," she said. "Who's paying to build these bots and what is their ultimate goal."
Lakshmi Iyer, an author living in Exton, Pa., describes herself as a power user of chatbots and thinks "it is capable of a lot of things, but the human in the loop is absolutely essential."
Iyer, 50, is part of They See Blue, an Indian American grassroots Democratic organization to drive up voter registration.
She did not use a chatbot to research her ballot, she said, but she used Claude, to create Ballot Lookup — a website that can inform Pennsylvania's voters about who is on their ballot and their stance on certain issues.
The website is described as an "independent, volunteer-built, nonpartisan lookup," and Iyer built it to help voters who may not learn more about candidates by searching across various sources.
Like other users, Iyer is aware that if chatbots "can infer your political leanings, they will push you towards what you are leaning to." To keep her own bias in check, Iyer prompted Claude to pick statements from the candidates' own speeches or from their official websites.
Some users noted that the decimation of local media has left them with fewer options for learning about down-ballot races. Tyler Black from Nashville, Tennessee, said he didn't use chatbots for House or Senate but is using them to learn about local candidates.
Black, who is a vice president at a software development company, is aware that chatbots sometimes hallucinate — that's when chatbots respond to prompts with false, misleading or fabricated answers. To overcome that problem, he often checks the information one chatbot has provided him against another.
Batista from JHU said that method of fact checking is better than using the same model twice, but he hasn't seen evidence that it is effective.
If users are using chatbots to research their vote, Batista said, they should frame their prompts in a way that their personal preferences are hidden, and they could use incognito mode so the chatbot doesn't have much prior information on them.
Adam Johnson in West Virginia is still researching and chatting with ChatGPT about his ballot. The county commission races are still on his list to look into. But he feels like AI helped him learn everything else he needed to know for November.
"I wouldn't feel too bad if I had to do the election today," Johnson said.