We’re excited to launch Spotlight PA’s 2024 Election Assistant, an experimental tool to connect Pennsylvanians with immediate and relevant answers to their questions about the 2024 election.
The tool leverages custom software and artificial intelligence (AI) to answer a variety of questions drawing on Spotlight PA’s reporting and trusted public resources from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
We’ve spent months vetting the Election Assistant to ensure its reliability and accuracy, and now we’re ready to share it with you.
Our goal is to help more voters
Every year, Spotlight PA receives countless questions about the election process, but our limited staff and resources make it hard to answer every inquiry individually. The Election Assistant will help thousands of readers find clarity and facts on a subject that has become a lightning rod for confusion and partisanship. From the basics of how to vote and how elections are administered to the details of specific candidates and what is at stake in each race, our tool seeks to answer your questions through an experience that’s faster, simpler, and all in one place.
The Election Assistant will also allow readers to ask questions and receive responses in Spanish, with links to previously translated Spotlight PA articles.
This project — supported by the American Journalism Project — builds on Spotlight PA’s Democracy Initiative, which seeks to extend the reach of our journalism to inform, equip, and empower Pennsylvanians to meaningfully participate in elections.
How it works (Hint: It’s not another chatbot)
We’ve partnered with Dewey, an AI startup, to create a highly controlled resource, trained on our bilingual election guides and articles, as well as official information from the Pennsylvania Department of State. Dewey’s custom software allows us to review and pre-program answers to a variety of questions, and also works in coordination with large language models to answer questions that are close in meaning to pre-programmed questions.
With this system in place, we’ve prioritized relevance and accuracy over breadth of coverage. The Election Assistant is not pulling from the entirety of the internet in the way ChatGPT and other chatbots do, so it cannot answer every question about the election.
The process is simple: You ask a question in English or Spanish, and the Election Assistant responds with a concise answer, including links to Spotlight PA articles and other relevant resources. From there, you can ask additional questions or click through to articles for more information. As with our election reporting, the focus is on the voting process in Pennsylvania, as well as statewide races and providing statewide context to national and local races.
We are committed to providing accurate, relevant information that empowers voters. While we have trained the Election Assistant on fact-checked reporting and worked hard to significantly limit the opportunities for the tool to misinterpret questions, reference outdated or irrelevant material, or “hallucinate” information, we are still experimenting with a rapidly evolving technology and cannot guarantee it will work as intended 100% of the time.
Whenever the tool may be unsure, we’ve opted for caution. That’s why users may find that the bot answers a query with "I'm sorry. It looks like I don't have an answer in our archives." This doesn't mean an answer to the question does not exist, but rather that we have not provided an answer within the training data based on Spotlight PA's reporting and resources from the Department of State.
We ask for your patience and feedback if you notice anything that seems off, and we promise to work toward improving the tool over time. You can reach out to elections@spotlightpa.org at any time with questions or concerns.
Why we’re using AI
AI presents transformative opportunities and challenges for the news industry. Whether we like it or not, it is likely to change the way we all consume information. Our goal as a statewide, nonprofit newsroom is to responsibly experiment with the technology so we can improve your ability to find the information you need and also better understand the instances in which AI can aid or hinder our work. No technology will replace the investigative and public-service journalism we produce. This tool is simply a means of getting that work into the hands of more voters.
We have already learned a great deal through the process of building and testing the Election Assistant. We have a better understanding of the power and limitations of AI, and we also have a better understanding of the questions we have not yet answered for our readers. This tool can help us focus future reporting to answer those questions and expand access to the news. And it will provide us with lessons we can share with newsrooms around the country about the opportunities and challenges of using AI in election coverage.
Ready to try the 2024 Election Assistant? Here’s the link. Let us know what you think!