Free Systems

📰 New research: Inside AI’s election news diet What news does AI read to get up to speed on politics? And what kind of news does it reward? Following interesting recent commentary on our Japan election study from @mattyglesias, @JerusalemDemsas and @TheStalwart, we ran a bigger test on the US midterms across 35 Senate races, 18 days, and 15,750 answers. What we found: - Each model has its own favorite news outlet for political news: AP for GPT, Yahoo for Claude, PBS for Gemini, and NYT for Grok. - GPT tends to behave like a civic guide (reading more election office and campaign sites), whereas Claude behaves more like a news summarizer (reading national news, Wikipedia, polls). - Grok draws on X and Gemini on YouTube for political information, far more than the other models we studied. Gemini cites YouTube in 55% of its answers and X shows up in 59% of Grok’s. - A huge share of AI's local news is provided by large nonprofit networks that very few people will have heard of. States Newsroom, a large network of over 40 local newsrooms, appears in 60% of GPT’s answers. - For many models, prediction markets are now a go-to source for polling information. Kalshi is cited more by Claude than any poll aggregator. Full study here: freesystems.substack.com/p/i…

Our very own @ahall_research sat down with @jasminewsun for a conversation on where public opinion on AI is heading, how AI policy issues fared in the midterms, and how frontier labs are navigating this intersection!

Join us at 1pm as we Monitor The Midterms with @MTSlive @danmthomp will be on to discuss our findings on how voters used AI to learn about the midterms, and what sort of information they got back

Among voters who have used an AI chatbot for the midterms, the most common uses were polling (39%), which candidates were on their own ballot (39%) and how to vote and register (38%). 21% say they asked it who to vote for.

A quarter of US registered voters say they have used an AI chatbot to find information about the 2026 midterms. Use falls steeply with age, from 48% of 18–24-year-olds to 8% of those 65 and over, and barely differs by party.

Explaining our automated ad agency experiment, but it's Mad Men

Could an AI run a political ad agency on its own? How might that impact our political information environment? To find out, @eigenstuffs gave four AI models their own advertising agencies, $100 a week, and one job: win subscribers to our AI & politics newsletter through Instagram ads. The task required them to do real political work well: understanding an audience, crafting persuasive messages, coordinating teams of AI agents, and learning from real results - all while navigating Meta’s rules. What happened: - They got more efficient. By week four, they attracted nearly three times as many subscribers as in week one, at less than half the cost per subscriber. - They herded. Once one agency found a cheaper route to subscribers, the others followed which flattened out their distinctive strategic insight - Their political messaging shifted. Research findings gave way to broader appeals about power, control and whose interests AI serves, and their deliberations increasingly sounded like ad executives Read the full piece and check out the ads they created here: freesystems.substack.com/p/b…

What might political information look like in the age of AGI? Read @TheStalwart's write-up of our Japanese voting study on how the information environment may shape model responses on voting advice. Substack write-up from earlier this year here: freesystems.substack.com/p/a…