Google’s Gemini AI Won’t Answer Your Election Questions

Google’s popular Gemini AI, formerly known as Bard, won’t answer questions about the upcoming elections in the United States and elsewhere, the company’s confirmed.

In comments made today to Reuters, Google says its Gemini AI chatbot is restricted from answering queries about elections taking place in 2024.

This includes the upcoming elections in the United States and national elections in other countries including India and South Africa.

If a Gemini user asks a question about an upcoming election, the chat bot will reply that it’s “still learning how to answer this question” and that users should refer to Google Search for answers to their questions.

Of course, the move doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Back in December, the company announced that “in preparation for the 2024 elections and out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we’ll restrict the types of election-related queries for which Bard and SGE will return responses.”

The company is looking to avoid misinformation issues during an election year as it reels from issues that forced it to pause Gemini’s image-generation back in February.

While Google is committed to this approach, competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT don’t have the same restrictions in place. At least as of right now.