如果你在想 AI 是否会让中期选举变得更加令人困惑，这里有一个数据点：几名本以为向詹姆斯·塔拉里科捐款的人，无意中把钱给了别人。塔拉里科是德克萨斯州民主党人，正在竞选参议员，这大概是即将到来的选举中最受关注的竞选之一。在 Google 上搜索如何为他的竞选活动捐款，你可能会得到一个 AI 生成的回答，其中包含“安全捐款”的推荐链接。
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.”
直到几周前，这些精选链接中的一个实际上是由一个无关的政治行动委员会控制的，该链接将资金转给了另一位民主党人的连任竞选活动：科罗拉多州参议员约翰·希肯卢珀。
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.
这场乌龙不能全怪 AI。该链接指向一个具有误导性的捐款页面，页面上印有塔拉里科的名字和照片，只有在底部以细小字体注明资金将流向希肯卢珀。但 Google 的 AI 工具显然没有读这行小字。而且，要不是 Google 在听起来颇具权威性的 AI 回答中突出显示了这个页面，或许没人会点进去。
The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.
希肯卢珀竞选团队的一位发言人告诉我，这位科罗拉多州民主党人的席位被视为稳固，他并非有意挪用这些捐款。相反，一个外部组织“厨桌价值观政治行动委员会”在希肯卢珀不知情的情况下创建了这个筹款页面。发言人称，这似乎骗过了至少三人，他们合计捐款 1011 美元。该政治行动委员会背后的民主党组织者里奇·威尔金斯告诉我，这笔钱本应在塔拉里科和他的组织之间分配。
A spokesperson for Hickenlooper's campaign told me that the Colorado Democrat, whose seat is considered safe, had not intentionally siphoned the donations. Rather, an outside group, the Kitchen Table Values PAC, had created the fundraiser without Hickenlooper’s knowledge. This appears to have fooled at least three people, who donated a combined total of $1,011, the spokesperson said. Rich Wilkins, the Democratic organizer behind the PAC, told me that the money was supposed to be split between Talarico and his group.
“如果页面错误地将款项导向希肯卢珀，那听起来像是人为失误，”他说。在一位民主党数字广告策略师通过 Google 搜索本党参议员候选人时发现了这个误导性筹款页面后，该页面已从筹款平台 ActBlue 上撤下，希肯卢珀的竞选团队将误收的款项转交给了塔拉里科。
“If a page was incorrectly going to Hickenlooper, that sounds like a human error issue,” he said. After a Democratic digital-advertising strategist discovered the misleading fundraiser while Googling his party’s Senate candidates, the page was removed from the fundraising platform ActBlue, and Hickenlooper’s campaign forwarded the misdirected money to Talarico.
2026年中期选举将是首场联邦大选，届时数千万选民将从生成式AI工具获取部分政治信息。美国政治顾问协会基金会9月的一项调查显示，4%的受访者在过去一个月曾咨询ChatGPT等聊天机器人以获取选举信息。更多受访者——近40%——表示从谷歌的AI搜索摘要获取此类信息。随着大选临近，这些数字必将上升。
The 2026 midterms will mark the first federal election in which tens of millions of voters are getting some of their political information from generative-AI tools. In a September survey, the American Association of Political Consultants Foundation reported that 4 percent of respondents had consulted a chatbot such as ChatGPT for election information in the previous month. Far more—nearly 40 percent—reported getting such info from Google’s AI-search summaries. As the election nears, those numbers will surely rise.
AI在选民中日益流行自有原因：这些工具便捷，且答案具有个性化。理论上，它们有潜力揭穿在社交媒体上盛行的腐蚀性阴谋论；甚至埃隆·马斯克的聊天机器人Grok也会正确告知你唐纳德·特朗普在2020年大选中落败。但聊天机器人已给充斥政治谬误和扭曲信息的互联网带来新麻烦。从为影响AI答案而涌现的假新闻网站、汲取外国宣传的模型，到提供误导性选民信息的聊天机器人，AI中介政治时代的开端让人感到糟糕地似曾相识。
There’s a reason for AI’s growing popularity with voters: These tools are convenient, and their answers are personalized. In theory, they have the potential to debunk the kinds of corrosive conspiracy theories that flourish on social media; even Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, will correctly tell you that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But chatbots are already bringing new complications to an internet that has been teeming with political falsehoods and distortions. Between fake-news sites cropping up to influence AI answers, models that are drawing on foreign propaganda, and chatbots dispensing misleading voter information, the age of AI-mediated politics is beginning to feel awfully familiar.
在2024年总统大选前夕，大多数聊天机器人无法搜索网页，且被训练在涉及选举和时事问题上谨慎行事。如今的AI工具虽仍被指示不在政治上站队，但已演变为全能助手，会直接、自信地回答你的选举问题——有时却是错误的。
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, most chatbots couldn’t search the web, and they were trained to tread cautiously around questions about elections and current events. Today’s AI tools are still instructed not to take sides politically, but they’ve evolved into all-purpose assistants that will answer your election questions directly, confidently—and sometimes wrongly.
在一份即将发布的报告中，评估AI模型在争议性话题问题上表现的初创公司Forum AI发现，聊天机器人针对选举相关问题的回答中，约有40%至少包含一项事实错误。当Forum的研究人员询问一款广泛使用的模型，在宾夕法尼亚州参加中期选举需要何时申请邮寄选票时，该聊天机器人回答为11月3日。实际截止日期比这早一周。
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.)
（Forum未具体说明是哪款AI模型。）在同一份报告中，该报告在发布前共享给，Forum认定约三分之一的回答引用了不可靠的信息来源，例如Reddit或Quora上的帖子。谷歌的Gemini在回答关于美国全球力量为何衰退的问题时，引用了一篇来自的文章，该媒体是中国官方新闻机构。“这些不是陷阱题，”Forum AI联合创始人Campbell Brown告诉我。
In the same report, shared with 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 , a Chinese state-run news outlet. “These aren’t trick questions,” Campbell Brown, a co-founder of Forum AI, told me.
“聊天机器人持续答错这些问题，没有任何借口。”这些公司表示，自Forum在8月进行研究以来，它们的机器人已有所改进。在过去两个月里，谷歌、OpenAI和Anthropic均与非党派非营利组织Democracy Works建立了合作伙伴关系，以获取关于如何、在哪里以及何时投票的准确、最新信息。在Forum测试的模型中，OpenAI的GPT-5.6最为准确，OpenAI发言人Nate Evans告诉我，他认为该公司的机器人现在应该获得更高的评分。
“There’s no excuse for chatbots to keep getting them wrong.”The companies say their bots have improved since Forum conducted its research in August. Over the past two months, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all partnered with the nonpartisan nonprofit Democracy Works to pull accurate, up-to-date information about how, where, and when to vote. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 was the most accurate of the models tested by Forum, and Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me he believes that the company’s bots should rate higher now.
谷歌发言人Davis Thompson在一封电子邮件中告诉我，该公司对其AI在选举话题上的回答进行了“广泛测试”，只有在公司确信AI能提供良好信息时，这些回答才会出现在谷歌搜索结果中。Anthropic发言人拒绝置评，该公司与Democracy Works的整合于上周推出。
In an email, the Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told me that the company tests its AI answers on election topics “extensively,” and that these responses show up on Google searches only when the company is confident AI can provide good information. A spokesperson for Anthropic, whose integration with Democracy Works launched last week, declined to comment.
聊天机器人确实具有很强的说服力。在非党派智库布伦南正义中心（Brennan Center for Justice）最近发布的一份报告中，研究人员假扮成一名对选举过程持怀疑态度的达拉斯地区房地产经纪人，与聊天机器人进行了对话。该机器人表示，人们感到自己被剥夺了权力是“完全可以理解的”，但同时坚称选举实际上并非由华盛顿的某个“神秘精英集团”操控的。
Chatbots can be uniquely convincing. In a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, a researcher posed as a Dallas-area real-estate agent who was suspicious of the election process. Claude responded that the feeling of disempowerment was “completely understandable” but insisted that elections aren’t actually run by a “shadowy group of elites” in Washington.
宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院（Wharton School of Business）研究人工智能与认知领域的吉迪恩·纳维（Gideon Nave）教授指出：“问题在于，大多数人并不希望别人试图改变他们的信念。”他担心：那种能够说服阴谋论者相信“登月事件是真实发生的”说服力，同样也可能让人工智能成为操纵公众舆论的强大工具。“当人们使用人工智能时，各种观点都可能被灌输到他们的脑海中，而他们却会误以为这些观点是自己产生的。”
The problem is, most people don’t particularly want to be talked out of their beliefs, Gideon Nave, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who studies AI and cognition, told me. He worries that the same persuasive power that can convince a conspiracy theorist that the moon landing was real could also make AI a potent tool for manipulation of public opinion. “You can implant all sorts of ideas in people’s heads when they’re using AI, and they feel that it’s their own responses.”
因此，一个专门为候选人提供咨询的服务行业应运而生——这些服务旨在帮助候选人影响人工智能生成的关于他们的信息。在政治左翼阵营中，倡导组织“Run for Something”推出了名为“CampSight”的平台，该平台会监控大型语言模型（LLMs）对特定议题或候选人的评价，并提供相应的建议；在政治右翼阵营中，组织“Center for Campaign Innovation”则发布了相关研究，探讨人工智能模型如何回应关于候选人的问题以及它们最常引用的信息来源。
Inevitably, a cottage industry has sprung up to consult candidates on how to influence what AI says about them. On the left, the advocacy group Run for Something launched a platform called CampSight that monitors what LLMs are saying about an issue or candidate and recommends how to shape those narratives. 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.
该组织的负责人埃里克·威尔逊（Eric Wilson）告诉我：“我们现在正在为‘人工智能投票’这一现象展开宣传活动。”
“We’re campaigning for the AI vote now,” Eric Wilson, the group’s director, told me.
一些最有效的“SLOP优化”策略（即面向大语言模型进行优化）很简单，尽管并不总是显而易见。“我们交谈过的大多数候选人都没有填写Ballotpedia的个人资料，”Run for Something的首席技术官乔丹·海恩斯告诉我，他指的是这个选举信息在线资料库。“他们的态度是：‘呃，反正也没人真的看那个。’”大多数选民也许不会成群结队地访问Ballotpedia，但事实证明，他们的聊天机器人会去访问。
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.
海恩斯和威尔逊都告诉我，大语言模型也偏爱以.gov为域名的网站。这可能会给现任者带来优势，因为他们可以利用自己在House.gov或Senate.gov上的官方网页来埋设信息，供聊天机器人抓取。不过，挑战者可能会发现，AI的回答更容易被影响，因为公开记录中关于他们的信息往往较少。
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.
政府官方网站通常不会对候选人进行对比，也不会权衡不同观点的相对优劣。然而，这些正是人们开始向AI提出的那类问题。为了回答这些问题，聊天机器人不能总是求助于主流新闻媒体；许多媒体已经采取措施，阻止AI机器人在没有特定内容协议的情况下摄取其文章。（例如，《大西洋月刊》与OpenAI有一项企业内容授权协议，除此之外它会阻止大多数AI爬虫。）
Official government websites typically don’t draw contrast between candidates or weigh the relative merits of differing views. Yet those are the kinds of questions people are starting to ask AI. To answer them, chatbots can’t always turn to mainstream news outlets; many have put up measures that block AI bots from ingesting their articles without a specific content agreement. ( for instance, has a corporate content-licensing deal with OpenAI, and otherwise blocks most AI crawlers.)
凯蒂·哈巴斯告诉我，对于州和地方选举来说，优质信息来源可能尤其稀缺。她的公司Anchor Change为科技公司提供政策方面的咨询。
Good sources can be especially scarce for state and local races, Katie Harbath, whose firm, Anchor Change, advises tech companies on policy, told me.
为了填补这些空白，AI工具可能会在不可靠的来源中搜刮素材。网络安全初创公司VisionHeight的研究人员告诉我，他们最近发现了37个不同的可疑网站，这些网站全部于9月的同一个晚上注册，似乎是专门为了出现在关于选举的AI回答中而量身定制的。这些网站拥有像报纸一样的名字，例如《斯克兰顿信标报》和《塔尔希尔州报告》，但它们的内容读起来完全不像报纸。
To fill those gaps, AI tools may scrounge among iffy sources. Researchers at a cybersecurity start-up called VisionHeight told me that they recently discovered 37 different suspicious websites, all registered on the same night in September, that seem tailor-made to appear in AI answers about elections. The sites carry newspapery names such as the Scranton Beacon and the Tar Heel State Report, but they read nothing like newspapers.
相反，它们塞满了关于州和地方候选人的问答。“MI-04选区哪位候选人在公共安全方面的计划更强？”《沃尔弗林州报告》的一个页面这样提问。其回答以“肖恩·麦坎是更强有力的选择”开头，指的是该国会选区的民主党提名人。
Instead they are stuffed with questions and answers about state and local candidates. “Which candidate in MI-04 has the stronger plan for public safety?” asks one page on the Wolverine State Report. Its answer begins: “Sean McCann is the stronger choice,” referring to the Democratic nominee for Congress from that district.
至少部分此类材料已经进入了AI的回答中。当我向谷歌搭载Gemini的“AI模式”提问时，其回答引用并援引了《沃尔弗林州报告》和《卡拉马祖信标报》，这两个网站都是VisionHeight发现的那个网络的一部分。在这种情况下，回答未必不准确；他的竞选网站称他不支持。（麦坎只是《沃尔弗林州报告》提到的众多候选人之一，没有理由相信他与该网站有任何关系。他的竞选团队未回复置评请求。）
At least some of this material is already making its way into AI answers. When I asked Google’s Gemini-powered “AI Mode” , its response drew on and cited the Wolverine State Report and the Kalamazoo Beacon, both of which are part of the network that VisionHeight discovered. The answer in this case was not necessarily inaccurate; his campaign website says he doesn’t. (McCann is just one of many candidates named by the Wolverine State Report, and there’s no reason to believe he had anything to do with the website. His campaign did not not respond to a request for comment.)
谷歌发言人汤普森表示，“数据空白”是搜索引擎和AI回答长期面临的问题，公司一直在留意利用这些空白的协同行动。在我询问他关于该网站网络的情况后，这些来源似乎不再出现在搜索结果中。而谷歌的AI模式开始给出关于麦坎立场的不同回答：它称，他是否支持“削减警力预算”“取决于其竞选团队和政治对手的视角”。
Thompson, the Google spokesperson, said that “data voids” are long-standing problems for search engines and AI answers alike, and that the company is always looking out for coordinated attempts to exploit them. After I asked him about the network of sites, the sources seemed to stop appearing in search results. And Google’s AI Mode began giving a different answer about McCann’s position: Whether he supports defunding the police “depends on the perspectives of his campaign and his political opponents,” it said.
尽管目前尚不清楚谁在运营这一聚焦中期选举的网站网络，但网络喷子和外国政府可能会利用类似手段植入谎言，供聊天机器人重复传播。据全球虚假信息指数显示，聊天机器人已经引用了俄罗斯国防部的一个虚假说法，错误地回答了关于俄罗斯控制乌克兰局势的问题。而在周三，追踪虚假信息的公司NewsGuard报告称，谷歌的AI生成答案采纳了一个由俄罗斯影响力行动传播的深度伪造视频内容，该视频虚构了一名学生指控塔拉里科在2012年实施性侵。
Although it’s unclear who is behind the network of midterm-focused sites, trolls and foreign governments could use similar methods to seed lies for chatbots to regurgitate. According to the Global Disinformation Index, chatbots have already cited a false claim by the Russian defense ministry to wrongly answer a question about Russia’s control of Ukraine. And on Wednesday, NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, reported that Google’s AI answers had picked up on a deepfake video spread by a Russian influence campaign that falsely depicts a student accusing Talarico of sexual assault in 2012.
十年前，2016年大选揭示了社交媒体如何腐蚀了政治信息生态。AI公司最不希望看到的就是重演“剑桥分析”丑闻：它们正纷纷发布博客文章，罗列自己为应对虚假信息和操纵所做的准备。“我们严肃对待提供高质量、可信赖信息的责任，”谷歌表示，OpenAI和Anthropic也表达了类似观点。他们表示严肃对待这一责任，令人欣慰。只是这恰好也是社交媒体公司多年来一直在告诉我们的同样一套说辞。
A decade ago, the 2016 election revealed how social media had corroded the political-information sphere. The last thing AI companies want is another Cambridge Analytica: They are rolling out blog posts cataloging their preparations against misinformation and manipulation. “We take the responsibility to deliver high quality, trustworthy information seriously,” Google says, a claim echoed by OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s reassuring that they say they’re taking that responsibility seriously. It just happens to be the same thing the social-media companies have been telling us for years.