Many Quebec voters got false election information from chatbot, MPs hear

Canadians turning to chatbots for election information don’t always get accurate responses, a Parliamentary committee heard Thursday.

An estimated 40 per cent of Quebec voters asked AI chatbots for election information, said Aengus Bridgman, a McGill political scientist who led a study tracking chatbot activity during the recent Quebec election.

But because most Quebec news outlets don’t allow chatbots to access their content, he said, those voters couldn’t obtain the most accurate and up-to-date information.

“Almost all Quebec newsrooms have blocked AI chatbots from collecting their content. Which means that AI chatbots are going elsewhere for information,” he said.

Taylor Owen, associate professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill, said researchers found that in the last three weeks of the election campaign, 39 per cent of voting advice provided by ChatGPT came from an error-filled hobby website built by AI.

“There was nothing nefarious by this person’s actions nor necessarily by the design of the chatbots themselves, nor by the publishers who de-indexed themselves,” he said.

“It was just this confluence of events that led to, likely, a large number of people getting false information about the election.”

“That’s actually a little bit terrifying … If that can happen by accident, imagine what could happen potentially on purpose,” Conservative MP Blaine Calkins responded.

Owen said that’s the question that needs to be asked “quite urgently.”

Thursday’s meeting was the first for a new study on AI and Canada’s democratic institutions launched by the House of Commons procedure and House affairs committee.