AI research firm Perplexity is testing whether it’s a good idea to use AI to provide crucial voting information with a new Election Information Center he announced Friday. The hub features things like AI-generated answers to voting questions and candidate summaries, and on Election Day, Nov. 5, the company says it will track vote counts live, using the data from The Associated Press.

Perplexity says its voter information, which includes polling requirements, locations and times, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group offers similar features from Google). And that his election-related responses come from “a select set of the most reliable and informative sources.”

Perplexity spokesperson Sara Plotnick confirmed in an email to The edge that both P.A. and Democracy Works are the official partners of the hub. Plotnick expanded on Perplexity’s sources:

We selected nonpartisan, verified domains, including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We are actively monitoring our systems to ensure that we continue to prioritize these sources when responding to election-related queries.

The hub provides details about the contents of the ballot, regardless of the location you enter (for example, an address or city). There are also tabs to monitor the elections for President, U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives starting Tuesday, with state breakdowns showing the percentage of votes counted and who is ahead.

The AI ​​summaries when I clicked on the candidates contained errors, such as failing to mention that Robert F. Kennedy, who is on the ballot where I live, had dropped out of the race. It also lists a “Future Madame Potus” candidate which, when clicked, took me to the above summary of Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy, except for a few meme images that are not in her normal summary.

Plotnick said the company is investigating why the summary didn’t mention that Kennedy dropped out. “Depending on your location, sometimes registered candidates will appear,” Plotnick added in explaining why the Future Madame Potus listing may have appeared. (This doesn’t explain why he summed up Harris, but Future Madame Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate, according to Ballotpedia.)

The errors illustrate the challenge of using generative AI whose accuracy is problematic for such a high-stakes use case, and why other AI companies have been reluctant to do so. ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini each redirect voter information questions to other resources like canivote.org or Google Search. Microsoft’s Copilot simply refused to respond when I tried.