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The announcement from Perplexity comes ahead of this year’s highly contentious US presidential election.
Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence search platform, has launched its Election Information Hub to provide voters with up-to-date information about the upcoming US election, which will see vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump battle it out at the polls on Tuesday, 5 November.
From Tuesday, the company will offer live election updates by leveraging data from The Associated Press. The company says its platform will provide answers to election-related questions “using a curated set of the most trustworthy and informative sources”.
“You can ask about topics like voting requirements, how to find your polling place and poll times, as well as receive detailed, AI-summarised analysis on ballot measures and candidates, including official policy stances and endorsements,” the company wrote in a statement. Democracy Works’ elections API will help to power this offering.
“We want to make it as simple as possible to receive trusted, easy-to-understand information to inform your voting decisions. For each response, you can view the sources that informed an answer, allowing you to dive deeper and verify referenced materials.”
Founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity is a generative AI start-up with a chatbot-style interface similar to ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing.
Since it launched, it has received significant funding from major tech players, including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
However, the company has also been on the receiving end of controversy this year. Forbes published a report in June claiming that Perplexity had plagiarised its content, citing a particular story covered by the news site’s own journalists which was followed by an “extremely similar” piece published by Perplexity the next day.
“Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission and republished it across multiple platforms – web, video, mobile – as though it were itself a media outlet,” the article read.
Speaking to Associated Press, co-founder and CEO Srinivas said the platform is “more of an aggregator of information” and that it “never ripped off content from anybody”.
The announcement from Perplexity comes after US government officials warned against relying on AI chatbots for voting-related information.
The office of New York attorney general Letitia James said on Friday (1 November) that it had tested “multiple AI-powered chatbots by posing sample questions about voting and found that they frequently provided inaccurate information in response,” CNBC reported.
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