Impact of LLM reliability issues on users’ political knowledge

Ascertain whether reliability limitations of large language models—such as hallucinations and potential political bias—substantively affect users’ political knowledge during real-world information-seeking tasks.

Background

While developers have introduced guardrails and techniques to reduce hallucinations and improve factuality, the authors explicitly acknowledge that it remains uncertain whether such reliability issues materially change users’ political knowledge in practice. This unresolved question motivates the paper’s randomized controlled trials comparing chatbot-based research to traditional internet search.