Read the full text at the Media & Journalism Research Center.
The researchers ask three questions: “Large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how journalists, researchers, and the general public access information on high-stakes topics such as elections, human rights, identity politics, historical memory, and public services. People around the world now turn to free AI assistants to understand how their electoral systems work, what protections exist for vulnerable groups, or how public services like healthcare are organized. First, how do free AI assistants perform on high-stakes civic and human-rights topics across diverse countries and languages when evaluated by domain human experts? Second, how do their strengths and weaknesses vary across issue types, from present-day service systems to contested histories of violence and corruption? Third, how do differences across bots and countries map onto existing information inequalities, and what does this imply for journalism, human-rights advocacy, and public knowledge more broadly?