PARIS, France: A brief conversation with a partisan AI chatbot can influence voters´ political views, studies published on Thursday found, with evidence-backed arguments -- true or not -- proving particularly persuasive.
Experiments with generative artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI´s GPT-4o and Chinese alternative DeepSeek, found they were able to shift supporters of Republican Donald Trump towards his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris by almost four points on a 100-point scale ahead of the 2024 US presidential election.
Opposition supporters in 2025 polls in Canada and Poland meanwhile had their views shifted by up to 10 points after chatting with a bot programmed to persuade.
Those effects are enough to sway a significant proportion of voting decisions, said Cornell University professor David Rand, a senior author of the papers in journals Science and Nature.
“When we asked how people would vote if the election were held that day... roughly one in 10 respondents in Canada and Poland switched,” he told AFP by email.
“About one in 25 in the US did the same,” he added, while noting that “voting intentions aren´t the same as actual votes” at the ballot box.
However, follow-ups with participants found that around half the persuasive effect remained after one month in Britain, while one-third remained in the United States, Rand said.
