YHK - yet another hacker news clone

People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms

36 points geox 3 hours ago 49 comments

yawpitch 2 hours ago | parent

To be fair, Americans have previously asked ouija boards, psychics, and the Magic 8-Ball the same question in the past… at least they’re not asking Grok.

Yet.

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent

> at least they’re not asking Grok.

To be objective, you should test across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, to see how fair they each are.

tencentshill 2 hours ago | parent

They all pull from the same internet. Many candidates don't even have a website, so are ripe for search poisoning at scale.

exe34 55 minutes ago | parent

You can be sure that at least grok will be carefully curated to lean a certain way.

smithcoin 21 minutes ago | parent

and the others aren't?

mossTechnician 1 hour ago | parent

I don't believe the American economy ever hinged on the success of the 8-ball, nor the CEO of Hasbro (owners of the Ouija trademark) called before Congress to question whether the boards could build bioweapons.

jasbury 2 hours ago | parent

> Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values.

This sounds like it can be a really good thing. In an ideal world it’s a perfect use of LLMs. It helps make the ballot more approachable to people, and it can encourage more people to vote or help people vote less blindly.

At the same time, it also relies on these tools being unbiased adjudicators. And over time I think there’s a greater risk of this straying from the truth.

Danox 2 hours ago | parent

Hopefully as a lark...

ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago | parent

And so it begins: the outsourcing of research, thinking, and reasoning to AI in lieu of using their own brains, an opaque AI in the hands of trillion dollar corporations with their own agendas and shareholders to please.

In the future, maybe we won't need election analyses to predict political victories, we can just ask all of the major brand of AIs who a voter should choose and then multiply by the market share of each AI, dohohoho.

pessimizer 19 minutes ago | parent

> using their own brains

Nonsense. There's no "using your own brains" in voting in the midterms. You get no information about the vast majority of the candidates, you're just expected to vote as the party tells you to, and the rest of the information you get is from PR firms in proportion to the millions spent to market to you and distort all the information that you could possibly find.

Even if you work your hardest and get a reasonable overview, you've dedicated far more of your time to this than anyone could be expected to (a sign of the leisure and access you have as a privileged middle-class person), and the vote will be necessarily decided by the vast majority who didn't.

People using LLMs for the midterms will be the best informed voters we've had in a long time, even if they use Grok (which will desperately try to lie to them, and won't be the only one.) They should also use LLMs to help them with strategies to get to an actual voting booth, because the parties like to sabotage voting in places they feel they'll be weak.

You seem to think everybody (but you) is a dummy and will just do what the LLM says to do, but were totally comfortable for them just doing what the party says to do. I might use an LLM myself to figure out what's going on with judges, if I can find one with access to the proper databases.

In fact, if you want to do good for the world, get access to good databases with good search engines, hook deepseek up to them, and open it to the public. People need to find out how judges decide, and if there are any complaints against them, etc.

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

While there is potential for this to be a bad thing, I think on the whole it's positive. Most/many people don't interact with democracy at all or only "red vs blue" which means increasingly less the more local you get (IMHO). Instead, focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system.

And maybe, just maybe, it will pull some of these dinosaurs out of the stone age and force them to put up a website with their views (crazy I'm saying this in 2026, it should have been table stakes decades ago). Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on. Your best bet is one of those "voter guides" that a local newspaper might put out and even those aren't great. Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

233mhz 44 minutes ago | parent

No problem with two companies owned by sociopaths who largely have the same political ideas, and are deeply tied to the current administration, controlling the tool used by the mass to decide who to vote for? Said tool being trained on reddit, twitter and other trash tier platforms where minorities of radicalised people on both side of the spectrum "discuss" political topics 90% of people do not care about.

Yeah, we're cooked chat, as they say

ShinyLeftPad 41 minutes ago | parent

not just two companies, by the way. remember grok and its views?

to me it's more alarming not just the cesspool that these are trained on, but subtle bias that can be added by people in charge or their friends... how naive to expect this won't happen

AlotOfReading 25 minutes ago | parent

Grok is a good example of how bad the labs still are at any sort of intentional, subtle bias. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but the best attempts today remain pretty hamfisted.

schwarzrules 40 minutes ago | parent

>> Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

A spin on that I used for my local elections last year: My prompt stated the issues that were important to me and why. I then copied in any election guide I could find from newspapers, blogs, newsletters, endorsements, etc.

Then I asked for 1) which best fits my priorities, and 2) risks for each (eg "says they will support homelessness programs, has no direct experience in an elected position")

ShinyLeftPad 36 minutes ago | parent

> focusing on what they candidates say/have done

who's going to cross check it? and even if everyone did, who's going to ensure that everything everything is mentioned, things can fact check just fine with some strategic omissions.

volkk 17 minutes ago | parent

you can have multiple agents run reviews and gut checks. open source models, etc. there are ways to go back and forth to get to some relative truth. regardless of complexity of said task, i would trust it a lot more than social media or search engines which are entirely corrupted by ad spend budgets.

smcg 25 minutes ago | parent

What's stopping someone from paying to influence AI results?

mcmcmc 23 minutes ago | parent

What’s stopping people from putting out biased voting guides that have nothing to do with AI?

vjvjvjvjghv 20 minutes ago | parent

Nothing. And it will happen big time once the AI companies become enshittified. Anthropic and OpenAI won't be able to produce the results that would justify a trillion dollar IPO without doing shady stuff.

yellow_postit 20 minutes ago | parent

How is that a different question than search results and which voter guides or topic editorials get highlighted first?

shimman 15 minutes ago | parent

You have to disclose if a site is part of a PAC or candidate's committee due to FEC laws. This is not the case for LLM slop that often intermingles the two.

So yes, it's very very different.

Maybe these LLM companies should also disclose in every chat window on what political spending they have already done:

https://influence.citationneeded.news/

taeric 11 minutes ago | parent

While this is true, there is a gaping hole in how foreign agents can amplify influencers on youtube and twitter. Probably even facebook, at this point.

simonw 17 minutes ago | parent

The employees of the AI labs. They're a pretty vocal bunch, and would be very likely to quit, whistleblow, or both.

(xAI may be the exception here.)

12376Qh 9 minutes ago | parent

Oh sure. The only whistleblower, Suchir Balaji. was murdered and the other employees just want to get rich (Brockman even is on record saying so).

A "vocal bunch"? They never depart from the party line.

micromacrofoot 5 minutes ago | parent

Multiple high profile employees have quit... 99.99% have not. What has changed as a result?

SukadarBukadar 18 minutes ago | parent

Ultimate tool for propaganda and manipulation tailored to each person's taste. Highly scalable and can focus on the things you (don't) care about when presenting "both sides".

The stakes are too high for it to not be weaponized, the only question is who will control it.

Kapura 13 minutes ago | parent

who do you think controls it? it's not a secret, they trade on the stock market

oulipo 11 minutes ago | parent

I don't think it's a good thing. The good thing would be to have a good education, and local groups with whom to discuss.

Blindly trusting a model that's easy to manipulate is not a good thing

micromacrofoot 6 minutes ago | parent

Homogenizing opinion though a small number of private companies with their own incentives is a pretty terrible idea, actually.

The current system isn't perfect by any means, but at least there's a wide variety of source and experience. Diversity can provide a buffer against viral problems, be it literal living viruses or information.

Funneling information through a handful of sources is akin to Sinclair Broadcast Group buying up rural news stations. Awful for democracy and diversity. Can put us a single virus away from destruction.

Zambyte 1 hour ago | parent

What's worse, a populatiom being uninformed, or homogeneously informed?

jawns 27 minutes ago | parent

The worst is homogeneously misinformed.

tuvix 26 minutes ago | parent

Depends on how they’re being informed I guess. Homogeneously informed can be okay to pretty bad. From mid-century American television and print media all the way down to North Korea and Nazi Germany.

moezd 1 hour ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story) So it begins...

jerjerjer 34 minutes ago | parent

More like the year of the Whopper imo.

bisonbear 1 hour ago | parent

IMO for an involved voter, this is actually a good thing. AI can both help you clearly define your priorities and policy preferences via an "interview", and can subsequently find candidates who's publicly stated positions, and past record, align most closely with your priorities.

As always, AI can be used to completely outsource critical thinking, and doing so for elections is extremely concerning. However I would hope that more people use it to make better, more informed decisions, than to blindly choose candidates

metalman 51 minutes ago | parent

This can only be illegal. Law, and all human rights and responsibilitys are built on the idea of humans making indipendent Judgments, free from any coersion or missleading information,, and so to allow giving voting advice from a machine with known, programed in, biases and inhibitory blocks is impossible, and could very quickly lead to total AI bans in many juristictions as there may be no reasonable way to monitor and certify such devices.

thrownaway561 46 minutes ago | parent

Just vote for your party. cough Republican cough

chirau 42 minutes ago | parent

Any guesses what Grok will be pushing people towards?

smithcoin 22 minutes ago | parent

And Grok's competitors doing the opposite is justified?

mcmcmc 20 minutes ago | parent

Is there any evidence of those competitors pushing political biases? (Actual biases, not facts like Trump losing the 2020 election and staging an attempted coup)

MattCruikshank 39 minutes ago | parent

Is there a sci-fi novel yet, where everyone teaches their own AI how to correctly predict how they answer moral questions, and how they prioritize their principles? And then their AI actually represents them in Congress? Representative AI Democracy?

(Yes, this is a potential Torment Nexus.)

Nashooo 30 minutes ago | parent

Like the cookies from Black Mirror.

yellow_postit 19 minutes ago | parent

Solve a trolley problem to align self driving car with your morals.

colechristensen 35 minutes ago | parent

The best way for these hosted LLMs to handle this is to follow the example of Tolkien's elves:

> “The choice is yours: to go or wait.”

> “And it is also said,” answered Frodo: “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”

> “Is it indeed?” laughed Gildor. “Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”

Imnimo 34 minutes ago | parent

In general I think it's a good thing that people are trying to get more informed before voting, but I worry that if this becomes popular enough, there will be a lot of pressure on the labs to influence what the LLMs say about political questions.

vjvjvjvjghv 23 minutes ago | parent

Maybe it's better than deciding based on TV ads.

pessimizer 14 minutes ago | parent

So much worse than just voting the party slate like they're told, and operating from television commercials.

Everybody should use ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms. They should ask for specific references to platforms and tweets, with links that they can follow.

Could the information you get be horribly distorted? Yes. But no more than the information you're receiving from every other source - and with LLMs you can drill down until it runs out of alignment. The TV doesn't take questions.

ramesh31 11 minutes ago | parent

It must be nice to be someone that can freely choose who they'll vote for, rather than being obliged to vote down the ticket for the side less likely to hurl racial slurs at you.