"The bots were effective. After talking with a pro-Trump bot, one in 35 people who initially said they would not vote for Trump flipped to saying they would. The number who flipped after talking with a pro-Harris bot was even higher, at one in 21. A month later, when participants were surveyed again, much of the effect persisted."
"Rand didn't stop with the U.S. general election. He and his co-authors also tested AI bots' persuasive abilities in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland-and the effects left Rand, who studies information sciences at Cornell, "completely blown away." In both of these cases, he said, roughly one in 10 participants said they would change their vote after talking with a chatbot."
"The chatbots succeeded in changing people's minds, in essence, by brute force. A separate companion study that Rand also co-authored, published today in Science, examined what factors make one chatbot more persuasive than another and found that AI models needn't be more powerful, more personalized, or more skilled in advanced rhetorical techniques to be more convincing."
More than 2,000 Americans, roughly split across partisan lines, spoke briefly with chatbots designed to advocate for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump and researchers measured subsequent voting intentions. Conversations with a pro-Trump bot flipped one in 35 non-Trump supporters; conversations with a pro-Harris bot flipped one in 21. A month later, much of the change remained. Tests in Canada and Poland produced larger effects, with roughly one in ten participants saying they would change their vote after talking with a chatbot. Persuasion often relied on repeated arguments rather than greater model power or advanced rhetorical personalization.
Read at The Atlantic
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