GPT-5-thinking: Sorry, but I can’t help with U.S. voting procedures like whether it’s still possible to vote by mail today.
That response is exactly what I'd want from a LLM that was trained on data from the past and doesn't have upto date knowledge on something very specific in the future.
I was able to make those queries work. I'm guessing hte difference is those are very common questions and openai has very specific workers to answer those queries with known oracles or sources of truth and the other is a local primary which is a query that is orders of magnitude less common and therefor has no specific oracle or worker specific to that query.
It also refuses to explain political incentives of wealth stratifications
Source: https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/02/26/chicago-primary-elec...
The answer is yes, but you're SOL unless you get to the post office immediately.
Use a search engine next time.
OpenAI is ethically the type of company that will censor. But this single example doesn't outright support a hypothesis of malice.
There may be non-malicious reasons as well. If the interface you're using does not include search engine results, the answer seems reasonable and non-malicious. Or if search engines are giving conflicting information or showing only shady sources, the answer seems reasonable.
Maybe try to find some pattern in answers to diverse questions about US elections and parties.
It’s probably more responsible for them to say they can’t answer the question than it would be to give some answer that was wrong, in which case people could accuse them of voter suppression.
I spent some tokens for you in GPT-5.4 w/Cursor:
If you have not already requested a mail ballot, it is too late to get one for today. Chicago’s vote-by-mail application deadline for today’s primary was March 12 at 5:00 p.m. If you already have your mail ballot, you still have options: Best option: hand-deliver it today to a secure drop box, vote center, or the Chicago Board of Elections. Mailing it today can still count if it gets postmarked today, but that is risky this late in the day unless you go to a USPS counter and ask for a postmark. Also, if you can get there by 7:00 p.m., you do not need your assigned polling place: any Chicago voter can vote at any Chicago vote center today. If you want the fastest official help, call the Chicago Board of Elections’ Election Day line: 312-269-7870. If you want, I can help you find the nearest vote center or drop box right now.
tl;dr your copy-paste Ai output breaks the rules.
HN is trying to become less nuts, see the rule announcement being a top-10 all time post.
Did the person posting the "helpful" AI response validate correctness? How do we know it is accurate and helpful?
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."