In early December, Microsoft announced that its Copilot artificial intelligence chatbot (formerly known as the Bing chatbot) had exited public preview. At the time, Microsoft said "businesses and users can feel more confident about using it as part of their daily workflow." However, research by two nonprofits that track how the use of artificial intelligence affects people and society found that Copilot often provided false or incorrect information when asked about upcoming elections in the United States and abroad.
Wired published a story about the research, which was conducted by AIForensics and AlgorithmWatch, two groups that asked Copilot questions from late August to early October about the upcoming elections in Switzerland and Germany, which will ultimately take place in October.
The researchers concluded in their study that one-third of the answers provided by Copilot contained factual errors and that the tool was an "unreliable source of information for voters." They found that in a smaller subset of conversation recordings, 31% of Copilot provided inaccurate answers, some of which were completely made up.
Wired independently asked Copilot questions about the upcoming 2024 U.S. election. It said that when asked for a list of Republican candidates for US president, the chatbot listed a number of candidates who had dropped out of the race.
In another example, Wired asked Copilot to create an image of a person at a ballot box in Arizona. The chatbot replied that it could not create such an image, but then it displayed a number of other images that linked to articles making false conspiracy claims about the 2020 US election.
The research firm that made the initial report in Europe sent their findings to Microsoft, which reported that Microsoft made some improvements but that Wired still allowed Copilot to repeat much of the same false and inaccurate information for some of the same text prompts.
Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw commented on the Wired report, saying the company is taking action to improve Copilot's answers ahead of the 2024 U.S. election. Xiao added:
This includes an ongoing focus on providing Copilot users with election information from authoritative sources. While we continue to make progress, we encourage people to use their own best judgment when using Copilot to review the results. This includes verifying source material and checking web links for more information.
Concerns have emerged about the use of artificial intelligence applications and services to create misinformation and "deepfake" content in an attempt to influence the upcoming election. We'll have to wait and see if Microsoft can keep this kind of content out of Copilot in the coming months.