The Dutch data protection authority (AP) has issued a warning against using AI chatbots for voting advice ahead of the October 29 election, citing concerns over the tools’ ability to provide accurate and unbiased information. The regulator found that chatbots disproportionately favored two major parties, the right-wing PVV and left-wing GroenLinks-PvdA alliance, in over half of their responses, raising concerns about potential voter influence.
The watchdog tested four major chatbots, which it did not name, and found they sometimes advised voting for one of the two major parties even when explicitly fed the campaign platform of a smaller party. The snap election in the Netherlands was triggered months ago by the collapse of the right-wing coalition after the PVV, led by MP Geert Wilders, exited. The vote is widely seen as a contest between the formation of a new, all-conservative government or a more centrist or center-right coalition.
An international study coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC found that major AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, distorted news content in nearly half of their responses. The research analysed more than 3,000 AI-generated answers in 14 languages and concluded that 45% contained ‘at least one significant issue’ when addressing news-related queries. OpenAI and Microsoft have previously acknowledged that so-called ‘hallucinations’—cases in which an AI system generates incorrect or misleading information—remain an issue they are working to address.