Perplexity wants its artificial intelligence (AI) search engine to guide you through Election Day.
The company’s Election Information Hub, launched on Friday, aims to help users “understand key issues, vote intelligently, and track election results,” all within the platform, Perplexity said in a release.
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“People deserve a clear, easy way to find the information they seek, and few topics are as consequential as elections,” the announcement continued. “We want to do our part to support an informed electorate, so we’ve built the election hub on Perplexity’s answer engine.”
The hub will feature live vote count updates pulled from data sourced by the AP and will cover US Senate and House races in addition to the presidential election. Users can ask Perplexity how to get to their polling location, what the requirements are for voting, and when polling times are, all of which are sourced from Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit voter resource, according to its website.
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Perplexity told The Verge that these answers come from “a curated set of the most trustworthy and informative sources” that are fact-checked and nonpartisan. The data comes from both news organizations and domains like Ballotpedia.
“We’re actively monitoring our systems to ensure that we continue to prioritize these sources when answering election-related queries,” Perplexity told The Verge.
Users can also get AI summaries of candidates’ policies and endorsements from the Information Hub. Of course, as with any AI tool, hallucination is always a possibility, even minimally – and an election is an especially dangerous context in which to be consuming incorrectly summarized information. That said, Perplexity does have built-in citations for every answer its engine produces.
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“For each response, you can view the sources that informed an answer, allowing you to dive deeper and verify referenced materials,” the announcement reiterated.
The Verge’s Wes Davis said he experienced some inaccuracies when exploring candidates in the portal, including a failure to note that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had dropped out of the presidential race and some odd memes related to Vice President Harris. Perplexity has since corrected the issue, but Davis notes that certain facts still don’t appear consistently in the AI summaries.
Try it for yourself at perplexity.ai/elections. Uncertain? You could always remove the AI variable and go straight to Perplexity’s partner sites, Democracy Works and Ballotpedia, or other resources like canivote.org or Google, instead.
