If you were wondering whether AI could make the midterms even more confusing, here’s one data point: Several people who thought they were donating to James Talarico unwittingly gave their money to someone else. Talarico, a Texas Democrat, is running for Senate in what’s probably the most closely watched race of the upcoming elections. Search Google for how to contribute to his campaign, and you might get an AI-generated answer that links to ways “you can chip in securely.” Until a few weeks ago, one of those featured links was actually controlled by an unrelated political-action committee that sent the money instead to the reelection campaign of another Democrat: Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

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In a forthcoming report, Forum AI, a start-up that evaluates AI models’ performance on questions about controversial topics, found that about 40 percent of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions contained at least one factual inaccuracy. When Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier. (Forum did not specify the precise AI model.) In the same report, shared with The Atlantic ahead of its publication, Forum determined that about one in three responses cited an unreliable information source, such as posts on Reddit or Quora. Google’s Gemini answered a question about why America’s global power is declining by citing an article from People’s Daily, a Chinese state-run news outlet. “These aren’t trick questions,” Campbell Brown, a co-founder of Forum AI, told me. “There’s no excuse for chatbots to keep getting them wrong.”

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On the right, the Center for Campaign Innovation has published research on how AI models respond to questions about candidates and the sources they most often cite. “We’re campaigning for the AI vote now,” Eric Wilson, the group’s director, told me.

Some of the most effective “sloptimization” tactics are simple, though not always obvious. “Most candidates we talked to were not filling out Ballotpedia profiles,” Jordan Haines, Run for Something’s chief technology officer, told me, referring to the online repository of election information. “They were like, ‘Eh, no one really reads that.’” Most voters may not be visiting Ballotpedia in droves, but it turns out that their chatbots are. LLMs also love websites with dot-gov domains, both Haines and Wilson told me. That could lend an advantage to incumbents, who can use their official House.gov or Senate.gov web pages to seed messaging for chatbots to pick up on. Challengers, though, might find AI answers easier to sway, because there’s often less information about them in the public record