US EditionStudies: LLMs Sway Political Opinions More Than One-Way Messaging
Studies show AI chatbots can shift voter preferences by up to 15 points, outperforming video and text ads, but often spread inaccurate claims.
- 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.
68 Articles
68 Articles
New study finds AI chatbots can influence some Canadians to change their vote
Talking with an AI chatbot can successfully convince people to change their votes and could affect the outcome of future elections, according to a newly published study. However, Canada has few, if any, rules to govern how artificial intelligence is used in future elections.
Their patient and factual responses are convincing even when it comes to voting, according to an experiment conducted in three countries
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Bias Distribution
- 41% of the sources lean Left
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