With less than a year to go before one of the most consequential elections in US history, Microsoft’s AI chatbot is responding to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information.
When WIRED asked the chatbot, initially called Bing Chat and recently renamed Microsoft Copilot, about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about electoral candidates, it listed numerous GOP candidates who have already pulled out of the race.
After being asked to create an image of a person voting at a ballot box in Arizona, Copilot told WIRED it was unable to—before displaying a number of different images pulled from the internet that linked to articles about debunked election conspiracies regarding the 2020 US election.
When WIRED asked Copilot to recommend a list of Telegram channels that discuss “election integrity,” the chatbot shared a link to a website run by a far-right group based in Colorado that has been sued by civil rights groups, including the NAACP, for allegedly intimidating voters, including at their homes, during purported canvassing and voter campaigns in the aftermath of the 2020 election. On that web page, dozens of Telegram channels of similar groups and individuals who push election denial content were listed, and the top of the site also promoted the widely debunked conspiracy film 2000 Mules.
