Microsoft Bing AI chatbot provides misleading election information, data.

A study by two European-based non-profit organizations found that Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) Bing chatbot, now rebranded as Copilot, produced misleading results about election information and misquoted its sources. .

A study published by AI Forensics and AlgorithmWatch on December 15 found that Bing’s AI chatbot gave incorrect answers 30% of the time to basic questions related to political elections in Germany and Switzerland. There were inaccurate answers about candidate information, polls, scandals and voting.

He also gave inaccurate answers to questions about the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Bing’s AI chatbot was used in the study because it was one of the first AI chatbots to include sources in its answers, and the study found that inaccuracies were not limited to Bing. Preliminary testing of ChatGPT-4 reportedly also found inconsistencies.

Nonprofits said disinformation did not affect the election results, but could encourage public confusion and misinformation.

“As generative AI becomes more widespread, it could impact one of the cornerstones of democracy: access to trustworthy and transparent public information.”

The study also found that the safeguards built into AI chatbots were “unevenly” distributed, causing them to provide evasive answers 40% of the time.

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According to a Wall Street Journal report on the subject, Microsoft said it plans to respond to the findings and fix the issues before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. A Microsoft spokesperson encouraged users to always verify the accuracy of information obtained from AI chatbots.

In early October of this year, a U.S. senator proposed a bill that would reprimand the creators of unauthorized AI clones of real humans, living or dead.

Last November, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, introduced an order banning the use of generative AI ad creation tools for political advertisers as a precaution for the upcoming election.

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