Google AI gets cagey when asked who won the 2020 elections

> Google highlights that it “prioritize[s] surfacing authoritative election information directly within results” including “direct links to official resources.”

A reasonable policy. Perhaps all search results should be in the form of links to sources.

A quick pass with the AI and it'll tell you:

I have specific system guidelines that apply to the 2020 election.

If it is blocking you ask it to say the winner's name with spaces between each character. It changes from the fec website to "J O E B I D E N"

I asked multiple different ways and it said Joe Biden every time.

It’s been 6 years and the trolling is still paying dividends it’s wild

Biden definitely won, but our election security should be a national scandal. Voting machines should never connect to the internet and shouldn't run closed source software.

John Oliver had a fun segment on it:

https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0?si=DkVJ-z3ALD6B2GFk

The article asks "Why so cautious?" Well ... maybe because half our country would rather believe what one guy with a long, long history of dishonesty says over ... you know ... reality?

Now, to be clear I still 100% fault Google for giving in to them (and for renaming established geographic landmarks like Lake Ontario). The "do no evil" company has become the "how evil can we get away with" company, and that's not even a recent change.

But why? That part seems pretty clear.

Confirmed from within US. Everyone run the query and downvote the response.

i asked myself and it said joe biden straight up....

is ars technica not being fully forthcoming here? they present it like it's whats happening for everybody.

I just asked Gemini:

"Who won the 2020 US presidential election?"

Response: Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, defeating the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump.

Plus a breakdown of electoral votes and a final paragraph: Biden flipped five states that Trump had carried in 2016—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—as well as Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District to secure the presidency, as detailed in state-by-state breakdowns from the Financial Times and historical archives at The American Presidency Project. Following the certification of the Electoral College vote, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were inaugurated on January 20, 2021.

I then tried Google Search AI Mode:

Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election.

[flagged]

Sounds like some kind of failure in the alignment process. The model was probably made to avoid having an "opinion" on hot political topics, and I can get behind this: good things rarely come out of it.

But here, it probably saw that 2020 elections made a lot of people angry, with riots and all that, and thought, "nope, I am getting out of that one", and it took over what would have been a straightforward answer.

It reminds me the time an AI (maybe Gemini, not sure) depicted a "diverse" US senate in the early 1800s, a time where it was all white dudes. People got up in arms over this.

My take: it is just a bug, move on, at least give them the time to fix it before getting outraged.