A decade ago, mounting an effective online influence campaign typically meant deploying armies of people running fake accounts and meme farms. Now that kind of work can be automated—cheaply and invisibly. The same technology that powers customer service bots and tutoring apps can be repurposed to nudge political opinions or amplify a government’s preferred narrative. And the persuasion doesn’t have to be confined to ads or robocalls. It can be woven into the tools people already use every day—social media feeds, language learning apps, dating platforms, or even voice assistants built and sold by parties trying to influence the American public. That kind of influence could come from malicious actors using the APIs of popular AI tools people already rely on, or from entirely new apps built with the persuasion baked in from the start.
And it’s affordable. For less than a million dollars, anyone can generate personalized, conversational messages for every registered voter in America. The math isn’t complicated. Assume 10 brief exchanges per person—around 2,700 tokens of text—and price them at current rates for ChatGPT’s API. Even with a population of 174 million registered voters, the total still comes in under $1 million. The 80,000 swing voters who decided the 2016 election could be targeted for less than $3,000.
Although this is a challenge in elections across the world, the stakes for the United States are especially high, given the scale of its elections and the attention they attract from foreign actors. If the US doesn’t move fast, the next presidential election in 2028, or even the midterms in 2026, could be won by whoever automates persuasion first.
The 2028 threat
While there have been indications that the threat AI poses to elections is overblown, a growing body of research suggests the situation could be changing. Recent studies have shown that GPT-4 can exceed the persuasive capabilities of communications experts when generating statements on polarizing US political topics, and it is more persuasive than non-expert humans two-thirds of the time when debating real voters.
Two major studies published yesterday extend those findings to real election contexts in the United States, Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom, showing that brief chatbot conversations can move voters’ attitudes by up to 10 percentage points, with US participant opinions shifting nearly four times more than it did in response to tested 2016 and 2020 political ads. And when models were explicitly optimized for persuasion, the shift soared to 25 percentage points—an almost unfathomable difference.