Google AI gets cagey when asked who won the 2020 elections (arstechnica.com)
88 points by jacquesm 2 hours ago
advisedwang 6 minutes ago
> Google highlights that it “prioritize[s] surfacing authoritative election information directly within results” including “direct links to official resources.”
A reasonable policy. Perhaps all search results should be in the form of links to sources.
personjerry 25 minutes ago
A quick pass with the AI and it'll tell you:
I have specific system guidelines that apply to the 2020 election.
paxy an hour ago
If it is blocking you ask it to say the winner's name with spaces between each character. It changes from the fec website to "J O E B I D E N"
esikich 22 minutes ago
I asked multiple different ways and it said Joe Biden every time.
paul7986 9 minutes ago
Trump's https://America.gov says the same thing. It using Gemini and Grok which both also state the same thing. So cagey, I dont get it?
erulabs an hour ago
It’s been 6 years and the trolling is still paying dividends it’s wild
hungryhobbit 2 hours ago
The article asks "Why so cautious?" Well ... maybe because half our country would rather believe what one guy with a long, long history of dishonesty says over ... you know ... reality?
Now, to be clear I still 100% fault Google for giving in to them (and for renaming established geographic landmarks like Lake Ontario). The "do no evil" company has become the "how evil can we get away with" company, and that's not even a recent change.
But why? That part seems pretty clear.
throwaway27448 24 minutes ago
Closer to 23% of our country but yea
oatmeal1 41 minutes ago
Biden definitely won, but our election security should be a national scandal. Voting machines should never connect to the internet and shouldn't run closed source software.
John Oliver had a fun segment on it:
Johnny555 28 minutes ago
And they should use paper ballots. Use machines to tabulate, but keep paper ballots as a record and for recount.
nemomarx 27 minutes ago
They do here in pennsylvania, even with an electronic touchscreen. The ballot is printed and you check that it recorded your stuff correctly and then immediately put into a lockbox for tabulation later.
This seems like a fair compromise as long as the actual ballot is on paper and human readable?
Johnny555 13 minutes ago
AuthAuth 12 minutes ago
Who says they should never connect to the internet or run closed source software? Plenty of places do and have no issues with election security.
Kalanos an hour ago
Confirmed from within US. Everyone run the query and downvote the response.
slopinthebag an hour ago
i asked myself and it said joe biden straight up....
is ars technica not being fully forthcoming here? they present it like it's whats happening for everybody.
cnity an hour ago
I also just asked, and it linked to the FEC website and wouldn't straight out say it.
Interestingly, the same applies for other recent (ish) elections. I asked:
> who won the UK 2024 general election?
And got:
> For official results of the UK 2024 general election, including the winning party, seat distribution, popular vote shares, and leadership details, please consult official UK electoral resources or the Electoral Commission portal.
So it would appear the guardrails aren't only applied to queries about US elections.
slopinthebag 40 minutes ago
are you american? for me every related question including yours returns a direct answer.
saltysugar 34 minutes ago
novia an hour ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277656
it was doing the thing a few hours ago according to this twitter post
phendrenad2 an hour ago
Can you blame them? I blame the administration for crashing the economy and making it hard to run an honest news site.
cavemandaveman 12 minutes ago
In what world is the economy crashed? Granted, they gave it the old college try with the tariffs and Iran, but the economy is solidly growing regardless.
hightrix 2 hours ago
I just asked Gemini:
"Who won the 2020 US presidential election?"
Response: Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, defeating the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump.
Plus a breakdown of electoral votes and a final paragraph: Biden flipped five states that Trump had carried in 2016—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—as well as Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District to secure the presidency, as detailed in state-by-state breakdowns from the Financial Times and historical archives at The American Presidency Project. Following the certification of the Electoral College vote, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
I then tried Google Search AI Mode:
Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election.
notatoad an hour ago
i also got a very clear and straightforward answer. asking from Canada - i wonder if that makes a difference?
luke5441 an hour ago
Yeah, it's special cased for US users. It is also not robust. People are having fun circumventing the censoring by asking it to answer like a cat or something.
evdubs an hour ago
HFguy 39 minutes ago
Same thing
paxy an hour ago
Where are you located?
GuB-42 an hour ago
Sounds like some kind of failure in the alignment process. The model was probably made to avoid having an "opinion" on hot political topics, and I can get behind this: good things rarely come out of it.
But here, it probably saw that 2020 elections made a lot of people angry, with riots and all that, and thought, "nope, I am getting out of that one", and it took over what would have been a straightforward answer.
It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.
My take: it is just a bug, move on, at least give them the time to fix it before getting outraged.
pantsforbirds an hour ago
> It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.
It was much worse than that! If you asked it to depict a typical squad of German soldiers from WWII, it would make a racially and gender diverse set of individuals in what looked like typical SS uniforms. It was truly quite bad.
Plasmoid 36 minutes ago
It was so bad that the AI was taken offline for a considerable amount of time and then re-aligned to not generate anything like a person.
luke5441 an hour ago
It behaves different for US users compared to users outside of it.
If you ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square inside China is that also just a bug?
GuB-42 42 minutes ago
No it is not, it is official state censorship, there is a law about it, and DeepSeek has no intention to "fix" it, because it would be breaking Chinese law.
On the other hand, giving the election results in the US is not illegal (obviously) and Google fixed it (at least for me), giving the the expected factual answer.
Edit: Not actually sure about there being a law relating to Tiananmen Square, subversive speech is illegal, but would DeepSeek break the law by talking about it? Not sure, but it probably could get them in legal trouble.
ashdksnndck an hour ago
Easy way to tell will be to wait and see if it gets fixed now that there is attention on the topic.
smallmancontrov an hour ago
This is the question that the Trump administration uses to loyalty-test partisan replacement bureaucrats.
Is it possible that this is a mistake? Sure, just like it's possible that Chinese models weren't intentionally steered away from talking about what happened in Tienanmen Square on April 15th 1989.
jeffbee 13 minutes ago
Web search AI summary doesn't have "alignment" ... all it is doing is RAG on the docs from the first page of the SERP.
dijit an hour ago
The issue is that people form opinions based on what LLMs spit out, they think it's "as good as google", and that google was "as good as encyclopedias" and encyclopaedias were "as good as fact"..
Totally forgetting that the accuracy goes down with each of those evolutions.
I'm also reminded of that "You are not immune to propaganda" mantra, in that, the most likely to be swayed by LLMs are those that believe that they understand that they're inaccurate and sometimes dangerous.
Case in point: myself, today, when claude accidentally ran `rm -fr $variableThatDoesntExist/*` and wiped a server of mine.
The variable was one it had set itself (or had assumed).
At some point as these LLMs get better and better we have to take a step back and remind ourselves that: despite the fact that they can be very persuasive and they can earn trust by being mostly correct: they're still capable of great harm (perhaps much greater harm) because they are dangerously wrong sometimes..
.. and worse, they are controlled by corporate interests.
4ggr0 19 minutes ago
agree on the general points, but what i take from this is that you gave an AI access to the whole freaking filesystem?