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AI Technology

The Other Election Night Winner: Perplexity (techcrunch.com) 47

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.

The Other Election Night Winner: Perplexity

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  • by Ed Tice ( 3732157 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:44AM (#64927499)
    This seems like a *great* use for AI as it takes out some emotional bias. By about 7:30pm Eastern Time, I already knew (as did most viewers) that Trump was going to win the election. But the pundits kept saying "We don't know the outcome yet." That's true because anything can happen. But if county after county shows Trump running 3% better than 2020 and there's no reason to believe they are outliers, well, Trump was clearly going to win.

    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.

    • I too like the NYT needle. Assuming the hard part (polling) has been done, I think, really, only a fairly simple statistical model is needed to factor in all the relevant information, and update it when a state is called. Then sample it to get the outcome probabilities.
      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        The polling was still undersampling Trump by 5 points or more. I'm assuming this is intentional to try and get people motivated to still go out to vote despite everyone knowing months ago that she was a horrible candidate. When Jim Carville is telling the PUBLIC they're going to lose 2 days after the coronation at the DNC, you know you're in bad shape.

        • What I meant was, combining the available polling into a statistical model (without AI) seems a doable task. But yes, if the underlying polling isn't very good, as seems to be the case, the resulting model isn't going to be very accurate until a lot of the results are in anyways. If the polling were perfect, the needle wouldn't move all evening.
          • /. is forgetting that nearly everyone needs a 'horse race' to either make money, bring in readers/viewers, sell consulting services, get your voting base out to vote, rake in campaign donations, build social media stars, and have something to talk about (politicians) other than how poorly they are doing their job (e.g., no US federal budgets for years and paying by continuing resolutions).

        • By "intentional" you think the pollsters were biased? Cheating? Occam's razor says they just had some methodology wrong, not that they were deliberately trying to sway the election. That's conspiracy talk given the huge number of polling sites and unlikelihood of this being coordinated.

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      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.

      • I don't think we can blame the polls here. The election was, as many are, largely decided on turnout. It's hard to get final numbers. But from what I can tell, there were more votes cast in 2020 than 2024. There were also many first-time voters who came out for Trump. We know this because they would come into the polling locations and then leave like a second later because the only bubble they filled out was the top of the ticket.

        JD Vance was right about one thing. Much or rural America had disengag

        • by guruevi ( 827432 )

          There was a series of things that backfired:
          - White simps for Harris (seriously the ad that was supposed to be appealing to 'menly men' was a set of gay guys)
          - Americans are garbage (Biden)
          - White women are weak and dumb (Cuban)
          - Black Men Will Vote for Harris—White Men Are the Problem (this is a headline from the legacy media)
          - The 'brothers' are the problem (Obama)
          - I've been in a barber shop (Harris)
          - I own a gun (how do you load a shotgun?), I'm a knucklehead, I was at Tiananmen square (after bein

          • - Black Men Will Vote for Harrisâ"White Men Are the Problem (this is a headline from the legacy media)

            See below for black men. No, they won't. As for white men, the vast majority would not vote for Harris for a multitude of reasons. WTF is "legacy media"?

            - The 'brothers' are the problem (Obama)

            Which is absolutely true. Black men are generally brought up that they are superior to women, particularly black women. The idea that they would vote for a black woman to be president was anathe
            • - Black Men Will Vote for HarrisÃ"White Men Are the Problem (this is a headline from the legacy media) See below for black men. No, they won't. As for white men, the vast majority would not vote for Harris for a multitude of reasons. WTF is "legacy media"?
              Ok, so let's unpack this shall we. Legacy media is the collection of media companies that operate predominately as newspapers, television, and radio, the "legacy" technology of the previous 70 years(older for radio and newspapers). The very same pe
              • Now, you come off sounding a little racist with the implication that white men have a multitude of reasons but black men are monolithic in their misogyny.

                When the white man VP says he doesn't understand why women don't want to have kids, who is with a convicted felon who has assaulted multiple women and raped at least two, not to mention was best friends with a white guy who ran a pedophile sex ring, tell me who the misogynist is. This article [afro.com] explains the issue of black men not voting for a woman.

                Obama made a point that a small but vocal contingent of men, including Black men, refuse to support any woman candidate for president. Many of them have unrealistically high expectations for Kamala Harris but donâ(TM)t hold Trump to the same standards. One Black man in Pennsylvania told reporters he plans to vote for Trump because Harris âoedoesnâ(TM)t come from a background similar to the majority of Black Americans.â That makes no sense. Does he think a White man who spent his career refusing to rent to Black people and spreading racist lies about us understands the Black experience better than a Black woman who grew up in Oakland, attended Howard University, and joined AKA sorority? Iâ(TM)m sorry. I call bullshit. That man just doesnâ(TM)t want to vote for a woman.

      • I do feel like for all the scientific polling, and talking heads for days with all the interesting theories, they sure don't seem to actually pass the test of predictive power.

        It would be interesting to know if the campaigns' internally-commissioned polling is more accurate.

        • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          It isn't. If it was they would make a lot fewer unforced errors and do a lot better job at spending time where it matters.

          The thing with polling is they don't just look at we called 1000 likely voters, 514 said x; x is polling at 51.4%

          They all have models which include assumptions like well party x is 10% less likely to answer polls. People who answer calls from 'unknown' tend to be older, y will do better with that group.. The Urban voters are more motivated this time; counties e,r,y count as urban, its

    • People mentioned long line-ups, yet more than ten million fewer votes were cast than in 2020. To me it looks like the most important difference was Trump threatening anyone caught voting illegally with jail.
    • By about 7:30pm Eastern Time, I already knew (as did most viewers) that Trump was going to win the election. But the pundits kept saying "We don't know the outcome yet." That's true because anything can happen.

      By 7:30 pm Trump's election victory was also quite assured in 2020. There still remains a big difference in votes counted depending on which batch are being counted and at what point they came in.

      You are suffering from survivorship bias.

      • In 2020, Trump's election victory was clearly not assured by 7:30pm since he didn't even win. I assume that what you mean is that in-person ballots were counted first and created a "red mirage" that has been discussed extensively. That told us nothing. The ballots were specifically counted in a non-random order.

        In 2024, we had, by 7:30, entire country returns that could be compared to the 2020 entire country returns. Comparing county-by-county complete counts told us everything we needed to know. Yo

    • since most of the media liked Harris better. (No surprise as she did exceptionally well among educated voters)

      The media did an amazing job of sanewashing Trump. Imagine the headlines if Kamala spewed word salad for answers or stood on stage listening to music for 40 minutes. This op-ed piece explains it well. https://link.motherjones.com/p... [motherjones.com]

    • Except... we already know what happened in the past when one side voted by mail in large numbers and a different group insisted on voting in person, so that the early leader fell behind after all those mailed in ballots started to be counted. Ie, Georgia in 2020. Trump was ahead, even after the polls closed, but eventually lose the state. Not cheating! Just math. The opposite possibly in Arizona, 2020, Biden was ahead by enough that Fox called it (controversially, but they were correct), but it was seve

  • by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:54AM (#64927511) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by bobthesungeek76036 ( 2697689 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @09:01AM (#64927521)
      This argument has been going on since television started broadcasting election results.
    • by Tora ( 65882 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @10:21AM (#64927691)

      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.

      • Countries or areas with ranked choice voting don't alwyas do it at once. Northern Ireland still counts them by hand, and they do it in passes. US is a strange bird though because the population is so gigantic that we really can't do what most major countries do: count by hand in each district.

        Note that in 2020 it took a month for all votes to be counted. Granted, that's _weeks_ after the mathematical certainly was established, which was a few days after statistical likelihood was certain. Granted, some st

  • 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.

    • Statistics. The math says the outcome is sufficiently likely given the data.
    • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      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

    • If you look closely at the numbers behind their decisions, they're examining the number of votes that have already been counted, and the percentage of the split per that total. Let's say state X has a historical tendency for rural voters to vote by 60% for party R and metro voters to support party B by 60%. The rural polls will have generally completed their counting earlier than the population centers, so that number of votes is already split approximately 60/40 between the two candidates there. Maybe it s
    • 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

      • Snag is California votes for more than just president, senator, and congress. It's a complex ballot. However MANY states are the same say. A lot of foreign countries don't lump it all together like the US so that their parliamentary elections are pretty fast to count. Also California is HUGE, it's a complicated mess to count them all, even if you presort all the early ballots. All those signatures have to be authenticated. Etc. I think if everyone was required to vote in person, and only electronic vot

    • Mostly stats. But sometimes they jump the gun too. Fox called Arizona for Biden early, big controversy because how dare they offend their conservative viewing audience; AP did call it too a bit later, after which a few others got in line. But some outlets did not call Arizona at all for few days, primarily because this was such an unexpected result, and during that time Biden's lead shrunk a lot. People were assuming that Fox jumped the gun, and jumped it badly. But the statistics were such that Fox was

      • I've heard that Fox is surprisingly accurate in their voting forecasts, but my point is just that; they're *forecasts.* Who cares what CNN or Fox or whatever thinks the vote will wind up being? Why are these forecasts considered to be authoritative?
  • Do the editors own shares or something?

Hold on to the root.

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