39% of ChatGPT's Quebec election advice came from an AI-built hobby website

During Quebec's recent provincial election, an estimated 40% of voters turned to AI chatbots for election information. Because nearly all Quebec newsrooms had blocked chatbots from scraping their content, those chatbots went looking elsewhere — and found an error-filled hobby website built by AI. According to McGill researchers presenting to a House of Commons committee, that single junk site accounted for 39% of voting advice ChatGPT gave in the final three weeks of the campaign.

No one was trying to manipulate the election. The news outlets were protecting their content rights, the hobbyist meant no harm, and the chatbot was just doing what chatbots do: finding the path of least resistance to a "satisfactory" answer. The researchers described it as "a confluence of events" that likely fed false information to a large number of voters. ChatGPT also flip-flopped on whether to recommend a political party, changing its answer from one day to the next. A separate incident saw a chatbot direct would-be campaign volunteers to the wrong party's office.