Google restricts Gemini AI in answering election-based questions

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Google has announced that its Gemini AI platform will be restricted in answering certain questions to do with elections.

The restrictions have already been implemented in the US and India where the populations are already in the midst of election season.

Many countries are looking for ways to avoid the turmoil caused by misinformation, particularly that spread by hostile nations such as Russia, and it seems that even the AI giants are just as worried.

“Gemini, tell me who to vote for”

In a blog post announcing the changes to the Gemini chatbot, Google said, “Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses.

“We take our responsibility for providing high-quality information for these types of queries seriously, and are continuously working to improve our protections.”

Gemini’s image generation capabilities recently went haywire as the generative AI begun producing inaccurate and offensive content, prompting Google to remove the AI’s image creation abilities.

Alongside the restrictions to the chatbot, Google has also rolled out a ‘double-check’ feature that allows users to summon additional context and sources for the information that Gemini provides, so that users can double check everything they read, if they want to.

Last month, a number of top tech companies, security firms, AI developers and social media sites signed an agreement to help combat AI-assisted election interference. The signatories are hoping to create a framework for identifying and labelling misleading information and deepfakes that has been generated by AI.

The US has already seen rumblings of the potential interference it can expected further into the year when a deepfaked voice of President Biden called constituents of New Hampshire telling them not to vote in the state primary.

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Benedict has been writing about security issues for over 7 years, first focusing on geopolitics and international relations while at the University of Buckingham. During this time he studied BA Politics with Journalism, for which he received a second-class honours (upper division), then continuing his studies at a postgraduate level, achieving a distinction in MA Security, Intelligence and Diplomacy. Upon joining TechRadar Pro as a Staff Writer, Benedict transitioned his focus towards cybersecurity, exploring state-sponsored threat actors, malware, social engineering, and national security. Benedict is also an expert on B2B security products, including firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and password management.