US EditionResearchers Find What Makes AI Chatbots Politically Persuasive
- On December 4, 2025, a pair of studies published in Nature and Science showed dialogues with large language models can shift people’s political attitudes through controlled chatbot experiments.
- Model training and prompting made a crucial difference, as chatbots trained on persuasive conversations and instructed to use facts reproduced partisan patterns, producing asymmetric inaccuracies, psychologist Thomas Costello noted.
- Researchers found concrete effect sizes, noting that U.S. participants shifted ratings by two to four points, Canada and Poland participants by about 10 points, with effects 36%–42% durable after a month.
- The immediate implication is a trade-off between persuasiveness and accuracy, as study authors found about 19% of chatbot claims were predominantly inaccurate and right-leaning bots made more false claims, warning political campaigns may soon deploy such persuasive but less truthful surrogates.
- Given the scope and institutions involved, experts now ask how to detect ideologically weighted models after tests with nearly 77,000 UK participants and 19 LLMs by UK AI Security Institute, Oxford, LSE, MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.
26 Articles
26 Articles
AI chatbots can significantly influence the political views of voters, as two new studies show. US voters were tested using artificial intelligence in terms of their political stance – with a surprisingly strong effect. Two months before the US elections, researchers made an experiment with 2,300 US Americans: they were supposed to speak with an AI chatbot that either promoted Trump or Harris. Participants were randomly distributed to the two ch…
Two new studies suggest: Chatbots like ChatGPT can change our political opinions – even to candidates we don't really like at all.
AI can be particularly convincing in changing a voter's political edge, even on the basis of erroneous evidence, according to two scientific studies published in Science and Nature magazines.
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- 50% of the sources lean Left
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