Substitutability of conversational AI for traditional search on political issues

Establish whether large language model-based conversational AI systems function as practical substitutes for traditional internet search engines when users research common political issues.

Background

The paper notes ongoing debates about the reliability of LLMs, including hallucinations and potential political bias, alongside recent technical mitigations such as retrieval-augmented generation and fine-tuning for factuality. Within this context, the authors explicitly state that it remains unclear whether conversational AI can serve as functional substitutes for search engines for typical political information-seeking tasks.