The tools tended to return incorrect election dates and information about how to cast a ballot, said Democracy Reporting International.

Chatbots produced by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI shared some false information about the European election, two months before hundreds of millions head to cast their ballots, according to an analysis shared exclusively with POLITICO.

While the artificial intelligence tools remained politically neutral, they tended to return incorrect election dates and information about how to cast a ballot, said Democracy Reporting International, a Berlin-based NGO that carried out the research in March. Chatbots also often provided broken or even irrelevant links to YouTube videos or content in Japanese, researchers added.

“We were not surprised to find wrong information about details of the European elections, because chatbots are known to invent facts when providing answers, a phenomenon known as hallucination,” said Michael Meyer-Resende, co-founder and executive director of Democracy Reporting International.