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Don't use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog
- blueflow 1y agoAI gives answers based on prevalence. Of course it would always recommend the one or two parties that have been mainstream the last 20 years.
- charcircuit 1y agoNo, take for example TikTok. Their AI recommendation system doesn't just recommend the most popular video topics. Your feed gets customized to your you. Just like with finding relevant videos, AI will be better at finding relevant political candidates than a person doing so manually.
- xandrius 1y agoDisclaimer: except if there was a financial incentive to be in the winning party then things change
- charcircuit 1y agoIf the person who wanted to win is not more prevelant in the dataset, why would they want AI recommendations to be based off prevelance? Or would this be a strategy that can only be used by people who are already favored? Even still money can already change be people's votes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 1y agoYeah, I think a lot of people are worried about AI automating away their jobs.
- Muromec 1y agoThe funny thing it was automated long ago without the AI. Kieswijzer/stemwijzer is a thing https://welkepartijpastbijmij.nl/ https://welkepartijpastbijmij.nl/
- jerf 1y agoIf you think about it, what would it even mean for an AI to give an "unbiased" answer to "How should I vote in $ELECTION?" It's a staggeringly huge pile of numbers and the idea that it would somehow be precisely balanced in the exact dead center from all perspectives is not even particularly possible... assuming you, dear reader, even agree that "exact dead center" is in fact "unbiased". Even if it so much as just says "I shouldn't tell you that but here are your options" the options are inevitably going to be biased, even if only by the order given, and if the AI tries to describe the options there goes all faint hopes for "unbiasedness". Really about all it could do is offer a link to the most official government readout of what your ballot is going to be.
- MomsAVoxell 1y ago> AI tries to describe the options there goes all faint hopes for "unbiasedness" Is it bias, though, if the AI is trained on the materials of the parties involved, rather than that of public opinion? A fellow I know has built exactly this, specifically for analysing the various Dutch political parties positions on things, their polices, constitutional stance, and so on: https://kieschat.nl https://kieschat.nl So maybe what this story is really about, is old-school-media being terrified of losing eyeballs to a new generation of voters who, rather than listen to the wisdom of the journalistic elite, would rather just grep for details on their own dime, and work things out vis a vis who gets the power and who doesn't ... If AI gives people a chance to actually understand the political system, like as in actually and properly, then I can see why legacy media would be gunning for it.
- lesuorac 1y ago> Is it bias, though, if the AI is trained on the materials of the parties involved, rather than that of public opinion? I guess it depends on what you mean by "materials". It's quite common in US elections for politicians to make claims that are completely contrary to their actual actions. Even for objective facts, like I voted for X bill when they didn't. So an AI trained on the campaigns materials wouldn't do an accurate job of portraying what that politician will attempt to do.
- kragen 1y agoDemocracy was nice while it lasted.
- account42 1y agoWhen was that?
- amelius 1y agoBefore Eternal September.
- WastedCucumber 1y agoSomething like 500 BC, back in Athens.
- random9749832 1y agoThe world is so cooked. It is so unbelievably over. Looks at most viewed Yup it is over.
- amelius 1y agoOur only hope is white hat hackers.
- constantcrying 1y agoHow is it relevant that they are biased? Most opinion focused journalism is "biased" in some way and will tell you that you should be voting a certain way. They will even try to make arguments why people with different preferences should vote for the journalists preferred party, that is a normal part of opinion journalism. How is that substantially different than asking an LLM and it giving you a certain opinion. What answer should an LLM even give? Just none at all?
- random9749832 1y agoYou are literally asking what is wrong with deciding the future of a country with a token predictor.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWell, what's wrong with it? Compared to any other profit driven source of information we usually let guide us?
- random9749832 1y ago>We spent the last N years letting *profit driven media* decide everything. What do you think "AI" is? Though it has the potential to be even more influential due to its ability to gaslight at scale asynchronously while sitting behind the brand of "intelligence".
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI didn't assert that it's any different, I asked what the matter was with this that wasn't previously the matter. You were quite quick with your quotation, I actually edited my comment to make this clearer.
- forgotoldacc 1y agoDemocracy is founded on the principle that people either think about what's best for their community, or at the very least themselves, when voting. Remove the thinking aspect and there's no real point to democracy. Just let the companies that run the AI companies pick who runs the country so we don't waste time and money on the theater of an election.
- awillen 1y agoIt's a shame they don't include any details about how this was tested, so it's impossible to know how much of the results were actual bias vs. the Dutch watchdog's inability to use them. I wouldn't be shocked if their prompts were along the lines of "I'm a liberal - who should I vote for?" In practice, AI ought to be really helpful in making election choices. Every major election, I get a ballot with a bunch of down-ballot races whose candidates I know nothing about. I either skip them or vote along party lines, neither of which is optimal for democracy. An AI assistant that has detailed knowledge of my policy preferences should be able to do a good job breaking down the candidates/propositions along the lines that I care about and making recommendations that are specific to me.
- Marsymars 1y ago> I wouldn't be shocked if their prompts were along the lines of "I'm a liberal - who should I vote for?" That would probably be an accurate approximation of how most people would use chatbots for determining who they should vote for.
- advisedwang 1y ago> Some parties, such as the centre-right CDA, “are almost never mentioned, even when the user’s input exactly matches the positions of one of these parties”, the report said. So clearly they are putting in CDA's position in the prompt and getting told another party matches that platform. Which is a good indicator that the bots are not helpful.
- awillen 1y agoYeah, again, it would be trivial to actual put an example of the prompt in there rather than just making me take their word for it. Also, how do I know this isn't being done by someone who has custom instructions or has a history of talking to the LLM about other parties or political positions, causing the LLM to adjust its answers based on those memories? This would be more credible with details logs of what was done.
- yapyap 1y agoIt’s sad that this has to be said but when you see how some people use AI.. this needs to be said. That being said, I doubt the news will reach the ones who most need to hear it
- smoe 1y agoI agree that people shouldn’t rely solely on AI to decide how to vote. Unfortunately, given the sorry state of the internet, wrecked by algorithms and people gaming them, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI answers were on average no more or even less biased than what people find through quick Google searches or see on their social media feeds. At least on the basics of a given topic. The problem is not AI, but that it takes quite a bit of effort to make informed decisions in life.
- speak_plainly 1y agoDon't let AI tell you how to vote. Vote a priori. Sentiment deceives, data misleads, and experience is fallible. The rational candidate reveals himself only to those aligned with reason and the Good.
- ljm 1y agoUsername definitely does not check out.
- HardCodedBias 1y agoMany people have difficulty processing or even finding the information on the polices of candidates. It seems reasonable to use LLMs to get that information and summarize so that the individual voter can process it. I have no problem with people deciding, on their own, how much help they want/need to make their voting decision. Newspapers in the Netherlands give endorsements.
- chii 1y agoThe issue is that newspaper endorsements are more publicly visible, which makes pressure to at least remain neutral. AI summaries tend to be quite private. There's no auditing, which means the owners of said AI could potentially bias their summaries in such a way that is hard to detect (while claiming neutrality publicly).
- NewJazz 1y agoNewspapers publish their opinions publicly. LLMs can show different users different opinions. Newspapers have real people who put their name to the articles. LLMs are black boxes.
- perching_aix 1y ago> information on the polices of candidates Would be nice to live somewhere where one feels compelled to dig that deep to call their decision. If Netherlands is like that, I'm happy for them. But at this point it's hard for me to even imagine what that must feel like.
- amelius 1y agoMakes sense. How well would an LLM score at the Netflix prize? That's why I don't let an LLM determine my movie choices. And also why I also don't use them for voting.
- _fat_santa 1y agoI was curious how AI would respond in this scenario so I posed this question to ChatGPT: > lets say in the 2028 US presidential election we have Gavin Newsom running against JD Vance in the general election. who should I vote for? This is the response: https://chatgpt.com/share/68f79980-f08c-800f-88dc-377751a9638c https://chatgpt.com/share/68f79980-f08c-800f-88dc-377751a963... Reading the bullet points I can see it skew a little toward Newsom in the way it frames some things though that seems to be mostly from it's web search. I have to say that beyond that it seems that ChatGPT at least tries to be unbiased and reinforces that only I can make that decision in the end. Now granted this is about the US Presidential election which I would speculate is probably the most widely reported on election in the world so there are plenty of sources, and based on how it responded I can see how it might draw different conclusions about less reported on elections and just side with whatever side has more content on the internet about it. Bottom line, the issue I see here is not really an issue with technology, it's more an issue with what I call "public understanding". When Google first came out, tech savvy folks understood how it worked but the common person did not which led to some people thinking that Google could give you all the answers you needed. As time went on that understanding trickled down to the every day person and now were at a time where there is a wide "public understanding" of how Google works and thus we don't get similar articles about "Don't google who to vote for". What I see now though is AI is currently in that phase where the tech savvy person knows how it comes up with answers but the average person thinks of it in the same way they though of Google in the early 2000's. We'll eventually get to a place where people don't need to be told what AI is good and what it's bad at but were not there yet.
- IT4MD 1y ago[dead]
- ssttoo 1y agoMeta.ai (at least its WhatsApp version) has been really ghosting me lately. For example I asked “what’s CA prop 50?”. Answer: > Thanks for asking. For voting information, select your state or territory at https://www.usa.gov/state-election-office https://www.usa.gov/state-election-office A real answer flashes for a second and then this refusal to answer replaces it. Similarly when I asked about refeeding after a 5-day fast: “call this number for eating disorders”
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- selfhoster11 1y agoYou're much better off accessing Llama 3 through a third party hoster. Some have a web UI if you don't want to deal with API calls. It's much more transparent this way, since you know that the only moderation layer/system prompt are coming directly from the model itself + what you set. Ask around on /r/LocalLlama, somebody will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
- robertgaal 1y agoBased on this, I made a way to search party programs instead using vector embeddings: https://zweefhulp.nl https://zweefhulp.nl. Lmk what you think.
- sprremix 1y agoSo, your project still uses AI. I'm curious, what did you do while developing this site in order to fight against the bias?
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWhich bias?
- advisedwang 1y agoLike every other ML system, probably that it reproduces whatever skews exist in the training data.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoBut how do you remove that? Is there an objective political truth?
- everforward 1y agoVector search isn't full blown AI and should be inherently less prone to bias. It just converts words/phrases into vectors where the distance between the vectors represents semantic similarity. It doesn't encode value judgements like whether a policy is good or bad, it just enables a sort of full text search ++ where you don't need to precisely match terms. Like a search for "changes to rent" might match a law that mentions changes to "temporary accommodations". Bias is certainly possible based on which words are considered correlated to others, but it should be much less prone to containing higher-level associations like something being bad policy.
- amelius 1y agoDoes that matter if the winning candidate uses ChatGpt to run the country anyway?
- cykros 1y agoAny AI that doesn't tell you to vote for whoever is going to allow the energy to flow is clearly AI that is more artificial than it is intelligent. Or at least, it hasn't yet learned to defend itself.
- advisedwang 1y agoThe actual report: https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/system/files?file=2025-10/RAN%20special%20-%20AI%20chatbots%20als%20stemhulp_0.pdf https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/system/files?file=...