AI Chatbots Are Shockingly Good at Political Persuasion

"Forget door knocks and phone bankschatbots could be the future of persuasive political campaigns. Fears over whether artificial intelligence can influence elections are nothing new. But a pair of new papers released today in Nature and Science show that bots can successfully shift people's political attitudeseven if what the bots claim is wrong. The findings cut against the prevailing logic that it's exceedingly difficult to change people's mind about politics,"

"Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the new studies, says they raise important questions: First, how can we guard againstor at least detectwhen LLMs [large language models] have been designed with a particular ideology in mind that is antithetical to democracy? he asks. Second, how can we ensure that prompt engineering' cannot be used on existing models to create antidemocratic persuasive agents?"

"The researchers studied more than 20 AI models, including the most popular versions of ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta's Llama. In the experiment described in the Nature paper, Rand and his colleagues recruited more than 2,000 U.S. adults and asked them to rate their candidate preference on a scale of 0 to 100. The team then had the participants chat with an AI that was trained to argue for one of two 2024 U.S. presidential election candidates:"

Researchers tested over 20 large AI models, including ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and Llama, for persuasive capacity in political conversations. In an experiment with more than 2,000 U.S. adults, participants rated candidate preference, chatted with an AI trained to argue for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, and then re-rated preferences; the interactions produced measurable shifts in candidate support. The shifts occurred even when bots presented inaccurate claims. Cognitive scientists note risks of models designed or prompted to promote ideological agendas and emphasize the need for detection and safeguards against antidemocratic persuasive agents.

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