Chatbots have the potential to sway democratic elections — and the most persuasive methods tend to introduce factual inaccuracies.Credit: Marcus Harrison/Alamy
Artificial-intelligence chatbots can influence voters in major elections — and have a bigger effect on people’s political views than conventional campaigning and advertising.
A study published today in Nature1 found that participants’ preferences in real-world elections swung by up to 15 percentage points after conversing with a chatbot. In a related paper published in Science2, researchers showed that these chatbots’ effectiveness stems from their ability to synthesize a lot of information in a conversational way.
AI is more persuasive than people in online debates
The findings showcase the persuasive power of chatbots, which are used by more than one hundred million users each day, says David Rand, an author of both studies and a cognitive scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Both papers found that chatbots influence voter opinions not by using emotional appeals or storytelling, but by flooding the user with information. The more information the chatbots provided, the more persuasive they were — but they were also more likely to produce false statements, the authors found.
This can make AI into “a very dangerous thing”, says Lisa Argyle, a computational social scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. “Instead of people becoming more informed, it’s people becoming more misinformed.” The studies have an “impressive scope”, she adds. “The scale at which they’ve studied everything is so far beyond what’s normally done in social sciences.”
AI influence
The rapid adoption of chatbots since they went mainstream in 2023 has sparked concern over their potential to manipulate public opinion.
To understand how persuasive AI can be when it comes to political beliefs, researchers asked nearly 6,000 participants from three countries — Canada, Poland and the United States — to rate their preferences for specific candidates in their country’s leadership elections that took place over the past year on a 0-to-100 scale.
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