Thinktank urges Government to close regulatory gap on “unreliable” AI services during elections

One third (34.1%) of responses across chatbots about elections contained factual errors, whilst reliability varied significantly across services, a report by thinktank Demos has claimed.

Its report, Electoral Hallucinations: Safeguarding UK elections in the world of LLms and AI chatbots, said errors included “getting the date of election day wrong, giving wrong information about the need for voters to bring ID, ‘hallucinating’ a candidate, and making up an expenses scandal on one occasion, and a nepotism scandal on another”.

Demos said the research was based on testing how ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Grok and Replika performed on a single day during the 2026 Scottish pre-election window.

The thinktank also revealed that polling it carried out over the week before the 2026 local elections suggested the inaccuracies identified in chatbot responses “could have severe implications for democracy across the UK”.

This polling found that:

• Use is widespread and growing: 1 in 5 adults (20%) reported using an AI chatbot or AI search service to find information about the local and devolved elections in the run up to 7 May  – equivalent to more than 10 million UK adults/
• The public are concerned about accuracy: Half (47%) are worried about AI chatbots sharing inaccurate information about elections and candidates/
• Public trust is very low: Half 49% do not trust AI chatbots for election-related information – “and the services are as distrusted as social media (also 49% distrust)”.

The Demos report can be found here.