Laundry-listing facts rarely changes hearts and minds – unless a bot is doing the persuading.
Briefly chatting with an AI moved potential voters in three countries toward their less preferred candidate, researchers report December 4 in Nature. That finding held true even in the lead-up to the contentious 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, with pro-Trump bots pushing Harris voters in his direction, and vice versa.
The most persuasive bots don’t need to tell the best story or cater to a person’s individual beliefs, researchers report in a related paper in Science. Instead, they simply dole out the most information. But those bloviating bots also dole