Conversational AI systems are increasingly being used in place of traditional search engines to help users complete information-seeking tasks. This has raised concerns in the political domain, where biased or hallucinated outputs could misinform voters or distort public opinion. However, in spite of these concerns, the extent to which conversational AI is used for political information-seeking, as well the potential impact of this use on users' political knowledge, remains uncertain. Here, we address these questions: First, in a representative national survey of the UK public (N = 2,499), we find that in the week before the 2024 election as many as 32% of chatbot users - and 13% of eligible UK voters - have used conversational AI to seek political information relevant to their electoral choice. Second, in a series of randomised controlled trials (N = 2,858 total) we find that across issues, models, and prompting strategies, task-directed conversations with AI to research specific political topics increase political knowledge (increase belief in true information and decrease belief in misinformation) to the same extent as self-directed Google search. Taken together, our results suggest that people in the UK are increasingly turning to conversational AI for information about politics. These findings substantially extend prior work by demonstrating that conversational AI's effects on political knowledge generalise across multiple topics, political perspectives, and model families, suggesting that the shift toward AI-assisted political information-seeking may not lead to increased public belief in political misinformation.

翻译：对话式AI系统正逐渐取代传统搜索引擎，帮助用户完成信息检索任务。这引发了政治领域的担忧——带有偏见或产生幻觉的输出可能误导选民或扭曲公众舆论。然而，尽管存在这些担忧，对话式AI在政治信息检索中的实际使用程度，以及这种使用对用户政治知识的潜在影响，仍不确定。在此，我们针对这些问题展开研究：首先，通过对英国公众的代表性全国调查（N=2,499），我们发现2024年大选前一周内，高达32%的聊天机器人用户——占英国合格选民的13%——曾使用对话式AI检索与选举决策相关的政治信息。其次，在一系列随机对照试验（总N=2,858）中，我们发现：在不同议题、模型和提示策略下，通过任务导向型对话让AI研究特定政治话题，能显著提升用户政治知识（增强对真实信息的信念，减少对错误信息的信念），其效果与自主使用谷歌搜索相当。综上，我们的结果表明，英国人正越来越多地转向对话式AI获取政治信息。这些发现通过证明对话式AI对政治知识的影响可泛化至多种议题、政治视角和模型家族，显著拓展了先前研究，表明向AI辅助政治信息检索的转变可能不会导致公众对政治错误信息信念的增强。