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Nov 06, 2024

Perplexity launches AI Election Hub — and promises it'll be accurate

Perplexity, an AI search company, wants you to use artificial intelligence to track election results. The company launched its Election Information Hub on Friday to offer AI-generated answers to

Perplexity, an AI search company, wants you to use artificial intelligence to track election results.

The company launched its Election Information Hub on Friday to offer AI-generated answers to questions you have about elections. The hub provides summaries of candidates and their policies — with somewhat vague descriptions — and offers information about local ballot initiatives.

“People deserve a clear, easy way to find the information they seek, and few topics are as consequential as elections,” the company said in a statement. “We want to do our part to support an informed electorate, so we’ve built the election hub on Perplexity’s answer engine: an entry point for understanding key issues, voting intelligently, and tracking election results.”

The company told The Verge it’s partnering with the Associated Press and Democracy Works to gather its data, and Perplexity cites Wikipedia in many of its entries.

“We selected domains that are non-partisan and fact-checked, including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We’re actively monitoring our systems to ensure that we continue to prioritize these sources when answering election-related queries,” Perplexity’s spokesperson said.

The company, which has backing from Jeff Bezos and Nvidia (NVDA0.00%), has previously been accused in a WIRED investigation of: making things up, often inaccurately summarizing topics, and even attributing fake quotes to real people. WIRED dubbed the site a “bullshit machine.”

But Perplexity believes its election hub will not have similar problems.

“We want to make it as simple as possible to receive trusted, easy-to-understand information to inform your voting decisions,” the company said. “For each response, you can view the sources that informed an answer, allowing you to dive deeper and verify referenced materials.”

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