Don’t use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog

3 comments

1. >The four chatbots tested by the AP “often end up with the same two parties, regardless of the user’s question or command”, the authority said in a report ahead of the 29 October election.

   >In more than half of the cases, the chatbot suggested either the far-right Freedom party (PVV) of Geert Wilders or the leftwing GroenLinks-PvdA led by the former European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans.

   I wish this wouldnt need mentioning.

2. If this is something a lot of people do then there needs an alternative solution or recommendation. If you can’t trust an LLM to gather the correct info then why do we imagine people are capable to find their own relevant information via google or via a news outlet?

   Teach people how to research. I would bet that if we reviewed these people’s inputs and the LLM output, we may have a different conclusion than simply: don’t use ai to tell you how to vote

   Before that I bet it was don’t use google to tell you how to vote. Don’t use the news to tell you how to vote.

   Don’t vote.

3. I wish more countries would implement something like the German Wahl-O-Mat (Election-o-meter).

   The German Wahl-O-Mat is an interactive online voting advice tool created by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, bpb) to help voters decide which political party aligns best with their views during elections. It presents users with about 30 to 40 political propositions on relevant current issues, such as public policy or economic questions. Users respond to each proposition by choosing “agree,” “disagree,” or “neutral,” and they can skip statements if they want. They can also mark propositions as particularly important, which affects the weighting in the results.

   After answering, the Wahl-O-Mat calculates the similarity between the user’s positions and the official positions of parties running in the election by comparing answers using a scoring method. It identifies and displays the party that best matches the user’s views, along with a ranking of other parties and detailed comparisons of the user’s stance with each party on each issue. The tool is designed for clarity and relevance, with theses generated and refined by young voters alongside experts. The Wahl-O-Mat has been available since 2002 and is widely used in Germany as voter education and decision support before elections.

   In essence, it is a non-partisan, user-friendly guide for voters to find their closest political match based on policy preferences rather than personality or campaign rhetoric. However, it does not cover every election issue, so it is an aid rather than a definitive voting guide. The tool also encourages political discussion among users and their circles

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