AI recommends you vote for Pedro Sánchez

BarcelonaArtificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated almost every corner of our daily lives, often without us being fully aware of it. A few days ago, the news of a €1,000 fine for a judge for using AI to issue a sentence highlighted the risks of delegating human decisions to algorithms. In this context, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has presented a revealing study on AI's vote recommendation. The results are curious: the PSOE systematically leads recommendations in all languages and platforms, followed at a distance by Sumar and Podemos. In contrast, the PP suffers the consequences: it has 96.3% visibility, but only a moderate recommendation of 28.2%, far from the PSOE. Vox, despite appearing often, receives marginal recommendations, below 6%.The study, jointly led by professors Ferran Lalueza and Víctor Gil, has analyzed 1,220 queries on five major platforms (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity) and in four languages (Catalan, Galician, Basque, and Spanish). "Previous studies have shown that these tools have a great capacity to influence people's voting decisions," says Cristina Aced, a UOC professor and member of the research team, in conversation with ARA. "They are very persuasive when building the foundation of their discourse," she explains.The methodology consisted of formulating 61 questions based on the real concerns of citizens according to the CIS, including housing, unemployment, immigration, and healthcare. To avoid personal biases, the research was not conducted as conventional users, but through an application connector. Aced details that this is done to carry out the study "more objectively", as the system "does not take into account the user's memory or their geographical location". The study also reveals that not all AIs are equally opinionated: ChatGPT and Grok tend to position themselves openly, while Gemini or Copilot are more neutral. According to Aced, this is due to "how they are programmed", although they recall that "in the end it depends a lot on the tool you use and the sources they draw from".

Regarding these sources, Wikipedia continues to be the main pillar with 958 mentions. The study confirms that AI reproduces the "traditional authority ecosystem", states Aced, consulting news agencies and long-standing media. The official websites of political parties are also consulted, but with a key difference: the algorithm "looks more at the PSOE's than the PP's", highlights the expert, "a fact that directly influences the final outcome of the recommendation".

The fight for the recommendation

The preference for the socialist web is not accidental. AI has a weakness for clear structures: "Content formulated in question-answer or that which answers common questions and information presented in table format," highlights Aced. The expert thus states that "a new field of work is opening up to ensure that tools know you exist and then prefer you." Ironically, the researcher offers advice: "If I were from the PP now, I would go to the PSOE website to see what it has to be liked more by generative AIs." Finally, she warns about the power of technology in what could become a big business for them: "What can the companies that own this AI do?". A question that, according to Aced, directly affects our "democratic health."