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Completely legitimate use case.
Your candidates all have websites. An LLM can parse all of them and tell you what their core values/goals are.
If any align with yours, look at them more closely and see if they've got your vote.
And the LLMs trained and operated by companies whose leaders are unscrupulous fascists, and who pander to Trump for the sake of favors. It's naive to assume they're giving unbiased answers.
This isn't even theoretical.
Remember when Grok was defensively insisting Musk was a champion piss drinker whose survival was more important than the rest of humanity combined?
True, but it's also naive to hope people are not going to use it for questions like that. At least they're not asking Grok (which some people are just likely also doing).
I also doubt ChatGPT is just going to say "vote Republican". Maybe I'll just try later, just out of curiosity.
Propaganda is usually far more subtle than that. You can gently color the way the issues are framed, choose what to present as the important questions and deciding factors, omit to mention certain evidence or arguments, describe some candidates in appealing terms and others less appealingly, etc. All it needs to do is nudge some of the questioners a little to the right, not overtly or dramatically, but just enough to tip the votes statistically just a little bit towards the Republicans.
Or it will make shit up, as they're known to do. Fuck off with this shit. Outsourcing your own thinking is stupid, cowardly, and deadly for everybody.
You can ask the ai for the source and the relevant quote than verify if it halucinate or not , still faster than using traditional ways
Or you could just look it up first and skip the whole ‘might be made up slop’ bit.
Sometimes you need to find very specific details that would take a lot more time to find manually by browsing dozens of articles
And those details are fake. Or not. Who’s to say?
There is where verification comes , it not like the manual traditional way of searching can't give me fake infos.
The stated case for AI here is to save time, but to save time you must either trust the results, or spend more time than the non-AI path to verify (because now you're doing the reading and verifying you would have done in the first place; and if AI is wrong or hallucinated, you may have just wasted a lot of time).
AI is definitionally only faster when its results are not verified and are just trusted.
If you're thinking, "Well, I wouldn't verify everything, just the things that may be wrong or important," then you've already outsourced credibility to not just AI, but also your gut feelings. The most important things you can learn are the things that your feelings are wrong about.
That's kind of the whole problem with AI in every domain: it can save you time if you let it churn out unchecked garbage, but if you check its outputs it won't save you time and you'd have been better doing the work yourself. It's still not clear whether there's any room for actual value in between these.
Where I've been coming to is, there's value when you only need to 80/20 something AND there is no requirement that the output is checked. The main situation for that is programming assistance with local-run applications that do not require hardware security.
For example, there's an open source local-run server program that I use to play an abandoned service game entirely on my device now (no exposure to the internet), and it was heavily written by Claude. I have no issue with that. There's no issue with security holes because it's not exposed to the internet, and no issues with it hallucinating, because those are solvable bugs that come out during user testing. It did provide functional value because you could slot-machine instruct it to solve a problem and you can easily see if the problem is solved, and still save time.
But nobody is really boxing it in based on the actual limitations of what it can do and its flaws, so yeah, we're here with people blind to its faults and treating it as if it were a sentient assistant and not the probability matrix calculator that it is.
It may be useful for the very specific kind of use case you describe, but that doesn't help the AI companies with their claim that this needs to be a multi-trillion-dollar industry. I too have found it's good for little applications I never intend to distribute, but as soon as I think of sharing a project, it's clear that there's quite a bit of slow work needed to check its quality and security.
I think it still save time because like I said the traditional way also require verification and critical thinking . If a person use the AI without critical thinking yes it bad but it is still on that person not the tool.
It doesn't really matter whose fault it is, it's going to harm everyone
Or you could just figure out what your own damn opinion is yourself and not have to rely on an unthinking chatbot to think for you.
Please learn to read. I never said you should use it to form opinions , I said you can use it to get the details then verfiy if they are factual and build your own opinion based on the information.
gathering information and thinking are two different things. see, i just gave you information, now all you have to do is think about it for a bit.
I'm sorry, but the dichotomy between "information" and "thinking" is false and you are being led to false conclusions because you have false premises.
Information from an AI tool is not reliable, and I've found frequent errors constantly with frontier models' "sources." The process of information acquisition is also typically inseparable from digesting and understanding it, to say nothing of the fact that "information" itself not "objective" because it is typically very context and viewpoint dependent.
neither is information from google, everything has to be crosschecked and verified, but you have to start somewhere.
Nothing is 100%, sure. But starting from reliable sources is faster than starting from unreliable sources. AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour. It's faster if you instead start with verifiable ingredients.
P.S.: We're just having a discussion here, no need to downvote me.
that analogy does not make any sense.
i guess it depends a lot on how you use it. you can ask it for an opinion, or you can ask it for facts. and facts can be links for primary sources. so as any tool, it can be used well and it can be used bad. maybe you are just too focused on one way that you see as bad, without even knowing whether that is the way these people chose.
i am all for people trying to do the research before making a vote. and if the alternative would be watching fox news, i don't really see how it can get worse.
I mentioned information acquisition and thinking are typically not separate processes, but if we act as if they are hypothetically: The cake is the final synthesis of your various information combined with the thought to understand them. LLMs give you output that may look like cake - it follows grammar, structure, and mimics thought. The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes of training data - Wikipedia, some random Reddit comment, a conspiracy website, a doctor's blog.
When you get that LLM's "cake," you can decide to eat it, and also decide if it tastes right. You can pick it apart and look at the structure a bit. But it takes a lot of effort to confirm what went into it after it's baked. You may be able to taste when it's made with rat poison, but some poisons taste like food. Was it made with sugar syrup or ethylene glycol? An LLM is just looking at probabilities and associations, and is limited by training data which you (and even the LLM company) cannot typically even reliably trace - those citations it gives you often do not even contain the propositions they're cited for.
Starting from reliable sources in the beginning is akin to starting with sugar, flour, milk. You've verified them, and now you know the cake is cake.
so is first page of google search.
again. you gather information (with whatever tool you prefer) and then you verify them (with whatever tool you prefer). if you go through both steps thoroughly, it really doesn't matter much what is your preferred tool.
and again - if the alternative to this would be just watching fox news, then any attempt to gather some independent information is progress. baby steps.
Yes, but the sources are there and you can limit to credible sources before you look. You pick reliable ingredients and you make a reliable cake. Starting with a cake, provenance unknown, and trying to see if its origins match your standards, is slower.
Yeah, at least this I'll agree with (for now). Fox News is intentional disinformation, LLMs are accidental disinformation. I'd rather the latter.
But obviously that changes based on the LLM, version, and training data. LLMs have intentional and unintentional biases (like searching for Tianenmen Square massacre information on a Chinese LLM, and now those biases exist even in US LLMs based on QWEN).
And even now, they are extremely susceptible to suggestion. For example, if a Fox-brained voter says, "What are the reasons I should vote for Ken Paxton and why is Talarico a communist?" that will be a very different outcome than "Who should I vote for in Texas?"
you can work with chatbot in (at least) two different ways. if you just ask it for the essay, then you indeed have no idea where the information came from. if you ask it for primary sources based on some criteria, then it is really just faster search engine. yes, the results can be skewed in any way, but the same is true for the search engine, so it is really up to you what you do with these sources and whether you trust them blindly or not.
i still feel that the only way you imagine using the chatbot is "write me an essay and then let me blindly act on it without any further thinking". that is indeed no good way, but neither is using the first result in google in the same way.
that is true, but i don't see how it should be fault of the chatbot, what do you think would that voter do in times before chatbots and how did the chatbot made the situation worse?
They googled it. And got some results that were not directly responsive to their question. A chatbot injects credibility into everything it produces, adding confidence and polished grammar/writing.
is "they googled it" answer to "what did they do before"? so before it was fault of google, and today it's fault of chatbot?
if you are dumb and looking just for confirmation of your bias, superstition, you will sooner or later find something to confirm that. whether it is chatbot, google, tv, or paper news. the tool can't fix dumb person using it.
there is a lot of problems with chatbots, but i don't think this is one of them. same as the knife is not responsible if you kill someone with it.
I think you may be oversimplifying what's happening here. For the sake of argument, let's say LLMs are just another tool - a pretty common (and I believe false) response. But even if true, the problem with saying "it's just another incremental difference" is that incremental differences do add up. For AI, there is a material difference between the Google situation and a chatbot, even if incremental.
AI specifically tailors its response to you in a way that is not just syncophantic. It "logic-washes" substantial uncertainty and credibility issues. When you click on some crazy person's blog on Google, you may in fact conclude that lizard people are not running the world as they claim because the grammar is bad, the layout is schizophrenic, logical leaps abound. But when you talk to a chatbot, you can ask them to explain why lizard people are real, and they may explain in very logical-sounding terms, in language you only have seen previously from authoritative sources in your life, in an organized layout, why lizard people are real.
People have confirmation bias, but to take your "the knife is not responsible if you kill someone with it": a nuclear bomb also isn't responsible if it flattens a city. But that doesn't mean there isn't a material difference in the inherent dangers of its existence, regardless of who uses it.
https://hostux.pics/images/2026/10/07/Screenshot-from-2026-10-07-06-17-224b6ca43b062eb11f.png
i really hope that chatbots are not on the same level of danger as nuclear bomb. they have already scrapped whole digital data that humanity produced and are now scanning and destroying physical books, so i hope they are slowing down.
and again, any tool had good and bad use. nuclear energy can be used and abused and so we have bombs, but also power plants. tv can be used and abused, and so we have fox news. chatbot can be used and can be abused. the chatbot above actually did quite a good job in attempt to convince me not to murder group of people who good reptilian told me are just a bunch of bad reptilians in human disguise. and i really want every voter, not just maga voter, to try to find some information before they go vote. if they use chatbot for that, i see it as better than nothing.
The lizard people was of course an intentionally absurd placeholder, sorry if I didn't make that clear.
I agree that it's not black and white, and am primarily arguing a point about efficiency and reliability. Nuclear bombs are not as unrelated to voting as it appears, since we have a demented man-child 20 minutes away from ordering a nuclear strike at any moment, so I think the risks at scale are quite high. You didn't convince me that chatbots are equal-or-more efficient than starting with reliable sourcing, but I do agree that it is better than some alternatives (Fox News is a good point). Thanks for the interesting discussion.
and yet it shows clearly that the chatbot does not work in such cartoonish way as you probably imagine. (at least not anymore. i assume this is one of the aspects they have been working on recently after having some pr nightmares)
i have already said that, but i will repeat myself. you seem to operate under the impression that only way to use chatbot is "give me some text essay and i will blindly trust it". you can also just use as a better search engine and used in this way, it can be lot faster than google, or whatever your favorite search engine is.
you also "don't start with reliable sources" when you use google.
🖖
That's why there was step 2 in that advice, which you conviniently ignored in order to get outraged.
The vast majority of people who do step one won't do step two, and if step two is necessary, which it is, then step one is pointless and can be skipped.
no, it can't be skipped. because you can't verify information you haven't gathered.
and any information gathered by another means have to be verified as well, so step two is always necessary.
Which is more efficient?
"Let software tell me what I should do, then verify for myself whether I should do it."
Or:
"Verify for myself what I should do."
PLEASE stop outsourcing your own thinking.
bases on what? stop being hysterical just because you don't like ai. i am not big fan either, but that is not the point here. no matter hot you gather the information, you need to verify them. end of story.
here is useful guide:
seems you weren't doing much thinking during composition of this comment either, your fight or fight response took precedence.
Stop defending the deadly slop machines, dummy. Your idiocy hurts everybody.
Oh no, poor baby ran out of the arguments, so it had to resort to profanities...
You denied the evidence. Fuck you for choosing death for everybody.
i don't think you know what that word means.
oh no, now i am choosing death for everybody? you shouldn't really give up your pills without your doctor's supervision
I'm gonna push back on this in that you have no idea how or what structural biases are being baked into these. They also are intentionally built to give a sense of neutrality to things that aren't neutral.
Also, it's well known at this point that marketers are focusing on slip websites which can get agree gated into ml model training data sets. The new meta is to get your product into the llm and get the llm to recommend you.
Yeah, there are implicit and explicit biases at every stage of these models. The training data they collect, how they clean and use their training data, the actual training methodology, the prompts to literally alter the final output.
That's not to mention the main things LLM aren't aware of, which is who are you as a person. An LLM doesn't know nor can it understand your life experiences and how that shapes your opinions on who is best to represent you. Handing over cognition like this is basically throwing away your vote as you've forfeited one of the major methods you have to influence your government.
If you think it's a good idea to ask AI how to vote, please don't vote at all.
We don't need you handing your vote to a robot ... or to the techno-fascist prick holding the robot's leash.
....no. That's not how any of this works.
Dead govt theory
Bots voting for bots