OpenAI says more than 2 million people interacted with ChatGPT in the 2024 election

Now that the 2024 presidential election has come and gone, OpenAI revealed on Friday how much voters interacted with ChatGPT.

Before the election, OpenAI took steps to stop the spread of false election information on the platform. Prohibit the use of ChatGPT to impersonate candidates or governments, distort the way voting works, or discourage voting. It also digitally tags AI images created using DALL-E for easy identification of AI-created images.

Additionally, the company has partnered with the National Association of Secretaries of State to provide accurate answers and direct users to CanIVote.org, a nonpartisan voting information center.

According to a blog post in the month before the election, one million ChatGPT responses directed users to CanIVote.org and rejected more than 250,000 requests for deepfakes of President-elect Donald Trump, Vice-President Kamala Harris, Vice-President-elect JD Vance, and Governor Tim Walz. On election day and the day after, ChatGPT’s two million responses encouraged users to look to the Associated Press and Reuters for election results.

Despite the steps taken by OpenAI to stop the spread of election misinformation, the Bipartisan Policy Center still has concerns after asking ChatGPT various poll-related questions. The Bipartisan Policy Center warned that “it’s still important to exercise discretion about its requests, especially when there are significant implications for our democracy.”

“It’s easy to mislead users when they rely solely on unverified sources, such as ChatGPT and other chatbots, for answers,” the policy center’s report continued. “The bot has limitations of prompt length and training information and generally does not respond with complete or consistent information. We would caution users to check ChatGPT responses with reliable resources such as government websites or their local election boards.”

This was the first presidential election where voters could turn to ChatGPT for election information and according to the Bipartisan Policy Center there is room for improvement before the 2026 midterms.