By Severin Carrell
Publication Date: 2026-05-20 14:56:00
The Electoral Commission has called for new legal controls on misinformation from AI chatbots after a think tank found they made serious errors in Scotland’s recent election.
Think tank Demos said its research found that AI services gave voters misinformation in 34% of the questions it asked, which it said raises worrying questions about the lack of regulation of AI platforms in the UK.
Ahead of the Holyrood election in May, a simulation was run where 75 questions about three real constituencies were asked to five free AI tools, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Replika, to see how accurate and evidence-based their answers were.
In his report, Electoral Hallucinations, Demos said these AI tools had variously fabricated fictitious scandals, given the wrong date for the election, falsely claimed that voters would need ID at polling stations in Scottish elections, and sent candidates to the wrong campaigns.
A parallel opinion poll of 2,005 British adults was commissioned…
