AI would vote for mainstream parties, shows Swiss experiment

ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, votes differently from humans, according to an experiment at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich. Nevertheless, AI will change democracy, say the researchers. If ChatGPT had the vote, it would probably back an established party, suggest the results of the study, which also conclude that ChatGPT makes more streamlined decisions than humans. How was the Computational Social Science team at ETH Zurich able to find this out? The large language models are programmed to react evasively to political questions. “If you asked ChatGPT whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, the AI said it was neutral and gave no answer,” Joshua Yang, a computer scientist at ETH Zurich, told SWI swissinfo.ch. So the team didn’t ask for big political decisions; instead, it asked the AI models ChatGPT4 and Llama 2 for their opinions on local, ostensibly non-political urban development projects. Among these were proposals to ...