Now that the election is over, the dissection can begin. As this was the first in which AI chatbots played a significant part of voters' information diets, even rough numbers are interesting to think about. For example, OpenAI says it booted some 2 million users of ChatGPT out to go look somewhere else.

It didn't just leave them hanging on the cold shoulder, but it did suggest some sources of trusted news it was comfortable referencing, like Reuters and the Associated Press. ChatGPT delivered this kind of "I'm only an AI; go read the actual news" response more than 2 million times on Election Day and the day after, OpenAI said in an update to a blog post about its elections approach.

For example, in the final month ahead of the election, it sent some 1 million voters to CanIVote.org when they posed questions pertinent to voting. And curiously, it also denied serving up images of candidates more than 250,000 times during the same period.
For comparison, another AI search engine called Perplexity cut loose altogether and tried to push its own vote information clearinghouse, which, the company said, clocked some 4 million page views (Bloomberg).

It's impossible to say whether these numbers are low or high. Certainly they are nowhere near leaders in the news: CNN's digital properties saw around 67 million unique visitors on Election Day and a similar amount the day after.

But traffic is a dicey metric at the best of times. What matters this year isn't that CNN got 10 times the traffic of these two AI platforms put together but that it got only 10 times the traffic. Millions of people were interested enough, and trusted AI companies enough, to at least ask or give their election knowledge a shot.

Of course, while OpenAI played it safe, and Perplexity may have succeeded in making a risk play, the AI industry in general must be highly elated by the fact that no serious faux pas was committed by any of the big brands (except xAI, of course) and that these chatbots and AI platforms were held in such high regard for their value as Election Day resources.

Fortunately for them, this election, although controversial in its own right, was fairly decisive and elicited very few grey areas such as disputed results, recounts, or lawsuits. Maybe they may not have fared so well if this were the case of the 2020 election that took place this week.