Do Voters Know They’re Using AI?

BJ, two things surprised me in this poll, and I want to start with the first.

So for the last four years or so, AI in politics is the thing I spend most of my professional time on.

So I'll admit that I'm in a bubble, but I was really shocked to see that just 4% of voters said they went to an AI tool for election information in the past month, but But 38% said they got information from a Google search AI summary and about half of those didn't even realize it was AI.

So what's going on here?

Well, I think the difference is between purposeful use of AI tools to find election and campaign information versus sort of this, we called it ambient use, meaning there are voters who are just Googling.

and they're reading summaries at the top of their Google search.

They don't necessarily realize, many do, that those are AI-generated summaries.

But with the high use of social media that we saw in the poll and the high use of all these other tools that are giving them AI-generated content, many voters, most voters, are being exposed to it fewer are actively using those AI tools to seek out that election information.

And while we only saw 4% said that they looked up something in the last month, when we sort of broadened the aperture and asked voters, are you using AI? Have you ever used AI for election or campaign information? It's about 20%.

So one in five have actively or purposely gone and sought out that sort of information.

But we have to accept the fact that everyone's getting it now, effectively.

They just maybe don't know or it's not intentional that they're going to go ask the AI tool.

They're just getting that AI-generated content back at them.

Yeah, I suspect it's one of these things where they just don't know what's going on.

The old joke of, I can't believe they built...

Shazam, the music lookup app, without AI.

I was like, well, no, that is AI.

We just didn't really call it that back then.

Or similarly, You know, if we ask voters, have you accessed any HTML slash CSS files in the last 30 days? And most of them would say no.

But, well, we all know that that's what a website is.

So I think part of it is, you know, once the technology sort of fades to the background, people understand how it's being

used.

Which is why we wanted to ask in the survey the question different ways and get at different uses and not being always specific.

Have you used AI tools or have you sought AI generated content? But just ask them generally about their sort of behavior, about, again, use of social media, about Googling information online and reading the search summary.

not telling them that that's AI.