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AI Politics

Perplexity Will Show Live US Election Results Despite AI Accuracy Warnings (arstechnica.com) 45

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Perplexity launched an election information hub that relies on data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works to provide live updates and information about the 2024 US general election, which takes place on Tuesday, November 5. "Starting Tuesday, we'll be offering live updates on elections using data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. The site will pull data from special data sources (called APIs) hosted by the two organizations. As of Monday, Perplexity's hub currently provides interactive information on voting requirements, poll times, and summaries about ballot measures, candidates, policy positions, and endorsements. Users can ask questions about the information similar to using a chatbot like ChatGPT.

Perplexity's embrace of providing election information is an exception in the AI field. Wary about accidentally providing misinformation, competitor AI assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic currently direct users elsewhere or decline to answer election questions. OpenAI's ChatGPT Search directs election result queries to The Associated Press and Reuters. Perplexity describes its new elections hub as "an entry point for understanding key issues." But like other AI models, Perplexity can produce confabulations (plausible incorrect information) when generating responses. That could present an accuracy problem because the site's Voter Guide service uses AI language models to summarize and interpret information pulled from the web.
Here's what Ars Technica advises: "Take what you see on Perplexity's site with a huge grain of salt -- do not rely on it without verifying the information with a trustworthy external source."
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Perplexity Will Show Live US Election Results Despite AI Accuracy Warnings

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  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @05:43PM (#64919719) Homepage Journal

    From their perspective, I mean. If they get things wrong, nobody will remember. It's a new technology after all, and you're asking it to predict the future, so you chalk it up to the impossibility of the task with present levels of technology. But if they get it *right*, they'll have the media and the nattering classes eating out of their hand for years to come.

    This is much like polling. Polling is inherently imprecise. Forget the "margin of error", that's the sampling error if they do everything else perfectly, which they never do. If a poll has a "2% margin of error" it's doing well to get things within 4%. The wonder is how accurately polls actually get things. So within the relatively wide pragmatic confidence interval of polling results, and with diversity of models and methods used by pollsters, *somebody* always gets it right by sheer luck. And in particularly if that person has a contrarian position, they will for the next decade or so be treated as the genius who nailed the election of year X.

    • Re:Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @06:25PM (#64919813) Homepage Journal

      So within the relatively wide pragmatic confidence interval of polling results, and with diversity of models and methods used by pollsters, *somebody* always gets it right by sheer luck.

      Which is what makes the polls this year so suspicious. Nate Silver called it "herding" - all the polls are showing a race tied within the margin of error. Almost every poll reports a confidence interval of 95%, so that means you'd expect 5% of polls - if they were truly random samples - to be outside that range.

      But they aren't. Because every pollster is absolutely terrified that they'll be declared "wrong" if the election doesn't go the way they polled. And a pollster who is "wrong" won't get paid to run polls in future elections. So they all do some "modelling" to "correct" whatever raw data they got. (It's also to deal with the fact that getting a random sample is, literally, impossible. There are just too many people who simply won't answer a poll, which makes any sample that doesn't include non-responders non-random, so pollsters do a whole bunch of things to try and deal account for that. If they did include non-responses you'd get polls that show something like 5% for each candidate and 90% "didn't answer.")

      You can't be accused of being wrong if everyone else in the herd was too.

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        The way this is supposed to work is that you develop a methodology to weight stuff and you follow it where it leads, and only *then* do you update your models for things like voter turnout and response, after you've taken your lumps. Altering your method to fix results you don't want to see should technically be regarded as professional malpractice.

      • So within the relatively wide pragmatic confidence interval of polling results, and with diversity of models and methods used by pollsters, *somebody* always gets it right by sheer luck.

        Which is what makes the polls this year so suspicious. Nate Silver called it "herding" - all the polls are showing a race tied within the margin of error. Almost every poll reports a confidence interval of 95%, so that means you'd expect 5% of polls - if they were truly random samples - to be outside that range.

        But they aren't. Because every pollster is absolutely terrified that they'll be declared "wrong" if the election doesn't go the way they polled. And a pollster who is "wrong" won't get paid to run polls in future elections. So they all do some "modelling" to "correct" whatever raw data they got. (It's also to deal with the fact that getting a random sample is, literally, impossible. There are just too many people who simply won't answer a poll, which makes any sample that doesn't include non-responders non-random, so pollsters do a whole bunch of things to try and deal account for that. If they did include non-responses you'd get polls that show something like 5% for each candidate and 90% "didn't answer.")

        You can't be accused of being wrong if everyone else in the herd was too.

        I'm not sure that's what's going on. Once the race is over no one remembers individual pollsters that much.

        What they're afraid of is being an outlier. If you're 2-3% off of all the other pollsters for the whole race you look biased and flaky.

        And if you're wrong in the wrong direction you look like idiots, but even if you end up being dead on the days of "oh they nailed it" might not make up for the months of people thinking you were biased and flaky.

        So, the safe thing to do is choose corrections so your res

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        I looked further into this; some statisticians say Silver is overestimating confidence intervals on polling by ignoring the fact that they're made from multiple sets of samples. Their calculations show a confidence interval about half of what Silver is calculating, which matches what we see fairly well.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      Computers [historyofinformation.com] vs humans [enemyinmirror.com]. It could go either way.

    • by kmoser ( 1469707 )

      If they get things wrong, nobody will remember.

      Which is why it is the duty of the legitimate media to ring this bell loudly and often.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @06:20PM (#64919797)

    Perplexity has called the race for US President! Congratulations, President Pat Buchanan!

  • Have I been living under a rock? Or would it kill the editors to occasionally put something in TFS that says who some random company I've never heard of is, and what they do?
    • Re:Who? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04, 2024 @10:22PM (#64920241)

      They say exactly what you're asking for as the first paragraph of the summary.

      Did you want them to put it in the title so you could ignore it there too?
      You'd just complain that the title was too long to read.

      Why didn't they pre-plant that information directly into my brain before showing me the headline? Now I'll have to highlight the word and click search.

  • with 10,000% of the vote, alongside Vice President Glenn Close
  • Might as well throw another gasoline soaked log on the blazing fire of things to point to when denying the election.

    Doesn't matter. The US has given up on democracy. The perception persists... but if the vote is only valid if your candidate wins, it's a fraud. If the view was only held by a few folks maybe you could claim the abandonment of democracy is an overstatement... but it's not.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @09:19PM (#64920153)
    Until Wednesday morning unless the voter turn out among the youth is just crazy.

    In early voting voter turnout among youth has been pretty insane. Georgia is up 30% equating to around 80,000 additional votes, Pennsylvania is up 100% and Michigan is up 220%.

    If that is somehow sustained through election day then you are going to see a blowout for the Democrats, even more so if the current 55 / 45% rates favoring women hold true.

    On the other hand if that evens out during tomorrow's voting then we won't know until probably mid-morning on Wednesday how the election actually went because it'll be too close to call. The only reason the youth and woman votes would allow the election to be called is they've been pretty consistently 75% for Harris so extremely high voter turnout in those groups carrying through to election day wood allow for the race to be called but anything short of that and it's going to be down to the wire and a few thousand votes either way.

    If you haven't already voted basically every place in the country is up for grabs. Even traditionally red states have the potential to flip blue. So if you didn't vote early you probably want to get your ass to the polls tomorrow
    • by DrSkwid ( 118965 )

      bookmarking this for the lulz come the weekend

    • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      In early voting voter turnout among youth has been pretty insane. Georgia is up 30% equating to around 80,000 additional votes, Pennsylvania is up 100% and Michigan is up 220%.

      If that is somehow sustained through election day then you are going to see a blowout for the Democrats

      You do realize that the youth vote has been trending towards Trump, right? The main theory is that young voters are either newly entered into the work force or are looking at their future prospects, and see an entirely ruined economy, and are hoping President Trump can turn things around.

      Another headwind against Harris is that a lot of the youth vote see her as complicit in Gaza, and while these voters aren't likely to be voting for Trump in protest, they may end up voting third party instead.

      Or, to put it

      • If you look at the individual demographics and his favorability versus Harris and his actual individual polls he is losing with every single demographic all the way up to the greatest generation. He's losing with young people ( young people being under 30 ) by 70-75%. He also has similar numbers across the board with women meaning that the 10-point lead of women voting over men is going to drastically affect the election even if it doesn't continue.

        So why are the polls so close? Pollsters are adjusting
        • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

          If you look at the individual demographics and his favorability versus Harris and his actual individual polls he is losing with every single demographic all the way up to the greatest generation. He's losing with young people ( young people being under 30 ) by 70-75%. He also has similar numbers across the board with women meaning that the 10-point lead of women voting over men is going to drastically affect the election even if it doesn't continue.

          Now that the election has been called for President Trump [thehill.com], will you consider maybe looking at the facts? There was every reason to believe the pollsters were still missing Trump voters and no reason to believe that they were missing Harris voters. Likewise, pretty much every demographic saw a shift towards Trump - including younger voters.

          Biden was an amazingly unpopular president, the economy is in the toilet and speeding towards disaster, inflation may have slowed but people still can't afford groceries,

  • ... do not rely on it ...

    Poll-takers have to account for the bias in the answers they get: Over the last few elections, that's been very difficult. In the last week, the poll-takers have admitted the factors of bias have changed and their corrections are probably over-corrections.

    There's been a lot of talk about the woman-vote, youth-vote and black-men-vote being vastly mis-represented: That is, the true swing is much greater than poll-takers are reporting. If true, it won't be a close election.

    ... an accuracy problem ...

    Big data has been calculating t

  • Election polls have always been wildly inaccurate, i.e. what many people say about how they'll vote doesn't reflect how they actually vote on the day or even if they vote at all. This is fairly consistent (or should I say inconsistent?) across elections & countries. The only reasonably reliable data is from exit polls, i.e. immediately after people have voted. Election observers use those figures to red flag any potential irregularities in vote counts.

    If media companies want to throw AI predictions i
  • Have any of you watched election day coverage?
  • by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @08:37AM (#64920969)

    **AI Predicts The Antichrist Wins 2024 Presidential Election, Voters Shocked But Not Surprised**

    In a stunning revelation that has left political analysts and religious scholars alike scratching their heads, a cutting-edge AI system has predicted that the Antichrist has emerged victorious in the 2024 presidential election. The announcement, made by the AI known as Oracle 3000, has generated equal parts panic and resignation among the populace.

    "Honestly, given the last few election cycles, this doesn't feel like a huge leap," commented local voter Sarah Mitchell. "I mean, my neighbor voted for a guy who wanted to replace Congress with a TikTok council, so this seems about right."

    Oracle 3000, developed by a team of engineers who clearly overestimated humanity's ability to handle bad news, explained its prediction in a 500-page report. The document, filled with cryptic references to ancient prophecies, alarming social media trends, and suspiciously high sales of pentagram merchandise, outlines how the Antichrist managed to secure a landslide victory.

    Political pundits have been quick to point out that the Antichrist’s campaign strategy was nothing short of revolutionary. By leveraging artificial intelligence, deepfake technology, and an unprecedented charisma that seemed to resonate with both millennials and boomers, the Antichrist managed to unite a deeply divided nation under a single, albeit ominous, banner.

    "It's truly remarkable," stated Dr. Helen Cross, a political science professor who specializes in apocalyptic governance. "He ran on a platform of universal healthcare, unrestricted open borders, crushing taxes, and eternal damnation, and people really seemed to respond to that."

    Meanwhile, religious leaders are scrambling to make sense of the situation, with some suggesting that perhaps the AI got it wrong. "We always thought the Antichrist would show up with more fanfare," said Reverend John Hargrove. "But hey, if the AI says it's him, who are we to argue? It also told me not to invest in crypto, and that was solid advice."

    Despite the dire predictions, the national mood remains oddly upbeat. "I voted for the Antichrist because, frankly, I was curious," said Mark Peterson, a self-proclaimed political thrill-seeker. "How often do you get to say you were part of the most apocalyptic election in history?"

    Legal challenges have already begun, with prominent organizations on both sides of the isle claiming that voters were confused when the Antichrist appeared on the ballot. The most common claim seems to be that voters thought that they were voting for "the other candidate" when they chose the Antichrist.

    As the world braces for what is sure to be an interesting four years, the AI's prediction has become a meme sensation, with hashtags like #Antichrist2024 and #EndTimesVibes trending across all platforms. Whether this is a sign of humanity's resilience or its impending doom remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the next State of the Union address is going to be one for the ages.

  • Why do we need to know up to the minute/second/nanosecond election results? It's not like a football game, where you can watch the action. I plan to ignore the whole thing until I can read about the results in a newspaper.

  • Perplexity Will Show Live US Election Results Despite AI Accuracy Warnings

    AI makes mistakes but it doesn't matter because: your system is so corrupt the 2000 election was stolen even though everyone knew lol.

    How does the US not collapse into a black hole caused by absence of morality?

  • Is this who SlashMedia is selling the their databases to? For AI n stuff. Thar's gold thar.

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