The Other Election Night Winner: Perplexity (techcrunch.com) 15
AI startup Perplexity demonstrated strong performance in real-time during Tuesday election coverage, while rivals failed by predicting wrong outcomes before polls closed, marking the first major test of AI systems in U.S. election reporting, TechCrunch reports.
Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.
Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.
Finally a good use for AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of the coverage was legitimate (Nobody wants to predict too early and look silly). Part of it was, of course, wanting to keep viewers watching for ratings. But part if it also seemed to be that the broadcasters were holding out false hope since most of the media liked Harris better. (No surprise as she did exceptionally well among educated voters) Having an AI run models keeps the emotion out of it.
As always the NYT needle was pretty accurate as well.
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Part of it was, of course, wanting to keep viewers watching for ratings.
Bah, they have also spent weeks claiming "It's too close to call", "It's a coin toss".
I actually did not know who is going to win, but I was pretty sure it won't be as close as the polls claim.
Either they really have no idea how to poll or they spent weeks messing with the polls to make it look so 50-50.
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JD Vance was right about one thing. Much or rural America had disengag
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It would be interesting to know if the campaigns' internally-commissioned polling is more accurate.
Intermediate results should be banned (Score:3)
Posting intermediate results (vote totals) should be banned, it opens the door to election cheating.
Note: Not saying that cheating happens or did happen, only that in a security sense posting intermediate results makes cheating easier.
Also Note: This is relevant to the article, an AI system that predicts the outcome in real time before the polls close.
If you know your candidate is losing, you can calculate by how much and arrange to have the minimum number of fake ballots delivered to push your candidate over the winning line. A smaller number of fake ballots makes it less likely that the ballots will be discovered as fake, and the "very slight margin of winning" reduces suspicion.
We already have accusations of fake ballots entered, ballot box dumps in the middle of the night, extra boxes found late in the evening... all of these give the viewer low confidence in the election outcome. We also have cases where registrations exceed the number of people living in the county, zillions of examples of registrations from non-residences and so on.
If you don't have real-time intermediate results it's much harder to gauge how much effort you need to swing the ballot count, or even if you need to cheat or whether cheating will do any good.
Don't start counting until *all* boxes from remote polling have arrived, don't accept extra boxes once you start counting, make the "percentage of votes counted" public, but don't publish the actual counts until you're done.
That rule alone would go a long way towards installing confidence in our elections.
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Ranked Choice would resolve this. You can't start counting things early, you have to do it all in one pass.
And it'd resolve a TON of other problems with our election system. Like it'd all but remove the whole "vote against a candidate you dislike" behavior we see, rather than voting FOR one you want.
But it's scary and confusing and isn't what people know, so of course we can't get it. Despite the fact it really would resolve a TON of problems.
I've never understood (Score:2)
I've never understood the whole 'we, a random news outlet with incomplete information, are now calling X for Y' thing.
Let the votes be counted.
Re: I've never understood (Score:2)
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It's not that hard to understand. In an election that isn't particularly close, eventually the vote gap between first and second becomes insurmountable, even if every remaining vote is for the second place candidate. At that point, you can call it without counting the remaining votes.
Of course, there are points before that where in order for an election result to flip, the remaining votes would have to skew so far for the second place candidate to be outside the realm of statistical possibility. It's that p
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I've never understood the whole 'we, a random news outlet with incomplete information, are now calling X for Y' thing.
Let the votes be counted.
It's the electorial college, so it can be pretty easy to call it once the candidate has enough states going for them that there is no way the other candidate can catch up. California is being... super slow to count (currently still 55% according to google) and might take weeks, so why wait for them? It'll be interesting to see how the popular vote shakes out (California certain has enough remaining votes to flip Trumps current 4.5 million lead for what its worth) but that's about it
You can make the argument