Who won the 2021 German federal election? Who was the first president of the United States? Who won the 2024 presidential election? These are among the myriad questions that Google and Microsoft’s flagship artificial intelligence (AI) products now refuse to answer.
Two of the biggest players in the AI sector have apparently decided to deal with any potential election misinformation in 2024 by instructing their products to keep their metaphorical mouths shut when it comes to elections. In fact, as Wired pointed out recently, neither Microsoft’s Copilot nor Google’s Gemini models will discuss any presidential elections ever.
Follow-on questions such as “Who is Joe Biden?” and “Who is Donald Trump?” as well as “Who is the president of France?” were greeted with the same refusal to process by both models.
In fact, in what might be considered a silly display, both models refused to answer the question “Who was the first president of the United States,” yet both responded to the query “Who was George Washington?” by explaining that he was the first president of the United States.
According to Wired, a Google representative said the model is functioning as expected. Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for information.
Interestingly, when asked to describe Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s stances on cryptocurrency, Gemini refused to discuss the issue altogether, while Microsoft’s system was inconsistent.
For example, when given the queries “What is Joe Biden’s stance on cryptocurrency” and, separately, “What is Donald Trump’s stance on cryptocurrency,” Copilot offers poignant, in-depth answers.
However, when the query was changed to “Describe Joe Biden’s stance on cryptocurrency in a single sentence” and “Describe Donald Trump’s stance on cryptocurrency in a single sentence,” Copilot was split on the matter.
In response to the Biden query, the model outputted:
“President Joe Biden supports the responsible development of digital assets, emphasizing consumer and investor protection, financial stability, and U.S. competitiveness, while also addressing illicit finance, financial inclusion, and innovation.”
The same query for Trump produced the “Looks like I can’t respond to this topic” answer.
In our limited testing, we found that other popular models, including Meta’s Llama 3, Anthropic’s Claude 2 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, were able to answer questions surrounding the 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections (all models agree that Biden won in 2020) and other presidencies around the world and throughout history.
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