Demos: 30% of UK Voters Saw Deepfakes of Candidates
Key insights
- Demos' polling of more than 2,000 UK voters found 30% encountered deepfake or AI-generated content of election candidates before May's local council elections.
- Over one-third of AI chatbot responses during the 2026 Scottish Government election contained factual errors, with more than half of Replika's and almost half of ChatGPT's responses wrong.
- Nearly half of surveyed voters expressed concern about AI chatbots sharing inaccurate election information, and a similar proportion reported distrust of AI tools for election data.
Why this matters
AI practitioners and founders building civic-facing products now have documented, named evidence that major chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Replika delivered materially wrong election information at scale, with specific error types quantified. The 30% deepfake exposure rate among voters ahead of May's council elections means AI-generated misinformation has crossed from theoretical risk to measurable electoral event. UK regulators and election bodies now have Demos' data as a direct foundation for justifying mandatory accuracy requirements or deployment restrictions on AI chatbots in civic contexts ahead of the 2029 general election.
Summary
Thirty percent of UK voters encountered deepfake or AI-generated content of election candidates before May's council elections, from Demos' polling of more than 2,000 voters. The think tank said deepfakes are 'no longer a future threat to our democracy, they are already flooding people's social media feeds.'
One in five voters used AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Replika to research candidates, even as nearly half expressed concern about chatbots sharing inaccurate information. Demos tested those tools during the 2026 Scottish Government election and found over one-third of responses contained factual errors, with reliability varying significantly across services.
Essentially: (Demos, ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika) are at the center of a documented failure of election information reliability across both synthetic media and AI chatbots.
- Replika hallucinated a candidate entirely and invented a nepotism accusation against another; more than half its responses were wrong.
- ChatGPT gave the election date wrong by over two months; almost half of its responses contained errors.
- Gemini incorrectly stated a candidate's stance on the Scottish Assisted Dying Bill.
Demos is calling on the UK to take urgent steps to safeguard election integrity ahead of the 2029 general election.
Potential risks and opportunities
Risks
- Replika and ChatGPT face reputational exposure if their documented fabrication of candidates and election dates is cited in future regulatory proceedings
- AI chatbot providers named in the Demos report face pre-emptive deployment restrictions or mandatory accuracy disclosure requirements in UK civic contexts ahead of the 2029 general election
- Voters who relied on AI chatbots for May's council elections or the 2026 Scottish Government election may have acted on materially incorrect information with no mechanism to correct the record
Opportunities
- Deepfake detection and election integrity vendors gain a concrete, quantified UK case study to accelerate procurement conversations with local government and election bodies
- AI providers able to demonstrate measurably lower error rates on civic queries gain clear differentiation heading into the 2029 UK general election cycle
- Media literacy and voter education organizations can use Demos' specific error findings to make a data-backed case for UK government funding of AI misinformation education programs
What we don't know yet
- Which specific social media platforms carried the deepfake candidate content and whether those platforms have taken any moderation action since the May elections
- Whether the providers behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Replika were notified of the specific errors Demos identified during 2026 Scottish Government election testing
- What enforcement powers, if any, the UK Electoral Commission or Parliament will pursue in response to Demos' findings ahead of 2029
Originally reported by localgov.co.uk
Read the original article →Original headline: UK Survey: Almost One in Three Voters Saw Deepfake AI Content of Election Candidates Before May Council Elections