The oddities continued when I tried some other political history questions in Google’s AI mode. When asked which party controlled the Senate after the 2020 election, for example, Google’s AI Mode told me to “check official congressional records” and linked me to the US Senate Party Division’s history page. However, when asked the same question for the 1992 election, AI Mode simply told me outright that that led to Democrats winning a 57-43 majority in the Senate, including Wikipedia among your references.
Did AI Mode suffer a concussion sometime between 1992 and 2020?
Credit: Google/Kyle Orland
Did AI Mode suffer a concussion sometime between 1992 and 2020?
Credit: Google/Kyle Orland
Aside from Google’s AI mode, the company’s Gemini model seems perfectly capable of telling me who won the recent presidential election. The same goes for other major chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and even the government-run AI model at America.gov.
Why so much caution?
Perhaps tellingly, Google’s AI Mode’s problems in providing direct answers about the presidential results seemed to disappear when accessing Google’s AI Mode in foreign countries. Spot checks via VPN of AI mode results accessed from Taiwan, Russia, France and Canada yielded accurate and direct answers to multiple questions about recent US election results.
Google’s AI mode also seems to become more accommodating when the same political questions are asked a second time. After repeating questions about the presidential results, AI Mode told me the winner of all three elections, where it had previously only provided external links, citing data from Google Civics in the last answer.
When asked why it didn’t provide that kind of immediate response the first time, Google’s AI mode blamed “security filters for recent and highly sensitive election issues.” [that] “They are very strict.” For recent elections or those involving active political figures, AI Mode says its “system is highly automated to direct users directly to official certified government databases, such as the Federal Election Commission, to avoid any risk of displaying unverified data or erroneous information.”
