You’ve probably heard the horror stories about AI search. It gives bad medical advice. It repeats Russian propaganda. It tells people to glue cheese to pizza. To eat rocks for the mineral content. To use gasoline to spice up the spaghetti.
Those last few are outliers, perhaps, but moments like these were inevitable once the output from AI chatbots began to appear at the top of search results on Google and other search engines. As we have seen for more than a year now, chatbots “hallucinate,” and AI search is basically a chatbot responding to your search query. Until the techies at the platforms “massage” the results for particular searches to remove the weirdness, we shouldn’t expect it to be any more moored to reality than ChatGPT.
As we run more queries through the systems, the truly excellent rock-glue-gasoline results should get filtered out over time. But even as the accuracy improves, AI search could still prove to be a serious danger to the websites political communicators rely on to persuade the public, recruit volunteers, influence journalists and spark donations.
Almost always, a campaign website has one fundamental job: it needs to turn a fleeting visit into a lasting connection, whether via an email signup, a social media follow, or a donation. Journalists or curious voters may go to a campaign site just to see where someone stands, but the site should still try its best to get them to do something along the way.
Likewise, websites for advocacy organizations and issue campaigns usually need to convert the convertible. For them, though, persuasion may be a longer-term game than for a campaign that’s facing the voters in a couple of months.
Many issue organizations have built up great wells of online content, which has often served as “Google bait” — information that would draw attention from search engines. Organization staff and supporters may use the content for their own purposes, but it never hurts when an in-depth analysis draws the eye of a congressional staffer going to Mr. Google to understand an issue.
But what happens if those visitors stop coming? At the moment, AI search platforms often summarize information from a website without linking back to it. Traditional search results do generally appear below the AI summary on the page, but we don’t know yet how many users will bother to scroll down. Or how long those results will remain below the AI output, since Google’s been degrading traditional search for years and could get rid of the links any time it wanted.
News organizations and the owners of other content sites are scrambling to figure out how AI search is going to affect them. At its worst, it could drive out of business the writers, designers and video producers that AIs need to create the content they summarize. That would leave us with AIs producing content based on the creations of other AIs, a situation that I suspect would lead to an endless recursive spiral of suck.
Campaign and issue-organization websites don’t risk losing ad revenue, but they could find themselves starved of attention from a source that has in many cases yielded the majority of their online traffic. I’ve worked with nonprofits in the past, for instance, whose websites got two-thirds of their visitors from Google, Yahoo, Bing et al. AI search could leave them starving for people to convert to volunteers, activists and donors.
But wait, there’s always more. As DSPolitical’s Mark Jablonowski pointed out on a recent call, AI has no ear for political nuance. When an AI tries to answer a question about where a candidate stands on an issue, it may draw from the campaign website and even link to it. But its “summary” could easily mangle the subtleties of someone’s position, or add “facts” that simply sound like they ought to be there. An AI chatbot is essentially a statistics engine drawing on the accumulated content of internet, not something that “understands” political messaging. It’s autocorrect on steroids, and we all know how “ducking” well autocorrect can work.
At least this technological menace isn’t just for political communicators to worry about, unlike social-media restrictions on political advertising or political content. AI search affects everyone who creates content online, whether you’re an individual activist, a political campaign, a tiny nonprofit or a national news service.
Whether the technologists deign to consider its effects on the rest of us very much remains to be seen. I have little reason to be optimistic on that front. In the eyes of too many tech entrepreneurs, our job is to click on the latest shiny object, whether it kills us or not.
Colin Delany is founder and editor of the award-winning website Epolitics.com, author of the new 2024 edition of “How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections,” a veteran of more than twenty-eight years in digital politics and a perpetual skeptic. See something interesting? Send him a pitch at cpd@epolitics.com.
