Jauhn Etienne Villaruel

Article (news)

📷༘ Solen Feyissa, Unsplash

<div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:960px;display:block" width="960"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1764894321588solen-feyissa-hWSNT_Pp4x4-unsplash.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/><span class="fr-inner" style="text-align:left">📷༘ Solen Feyissa, Unsplash</span></span></span></div><div><br/></div><p>PARIS, France — A brief conversation with a partisan AI chatbot can influence voters&#x27; political views, studies published Thursday found, with evidence-backed arguments—true or not—proving particularly persuasive.</p><p>Experiments with generative artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI&#x27;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.</p><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2025/12/4/facebook-supreme-court-admits-frustrations-in-5-years-of-work-2207">Facebook &#x27;supreme court&#x27; admits &#x27;frustrations&#x27; in 5 years of work</a></div><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>&quot;When we asked how people would vote if the election were held that day... roughly one in 10 respondents in Canada and Poland switched,&quot; he told AFP by email.</p><p>&quot;About one in 25 in the US did the same,&quot; he added, while noting that &quot;voting intentions aren&#x27;t the same as actual votes&quot; at the ballot box.</p><p>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.</p><p>&quot;In social science, any evidence of effects persisting a month later is comparatively rare,&quot; he pointed out.</p><div><br/></div><div><strong>BEING POLITE, GIVING PROOF</strong></div><div><br/></div><p>The studies found that the most common tactic used by chatbots to persuade was &quot;being polite and providing evidence&quot;, and that bots instructed not to use facts were far less persuasive.</p><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2025/11/21/ai-s-blind-spot-tools-fail-to-detect-their-own-fakes-1053">AI&#x27;s blind spot: Tools fail to detect their own fakes</a></div><p>Such results &quot;go against the dominant narrative in political psychology, which holds that &#x27;motivated reasoning&#x27; makes people ignore facts that conflict with their identities or partisan commitments&quot;, Rand said.</p><p>But the facts and evidence cited by the chatbots were not necessarily truthful.</p><p>While most of their fact-checked claims were accurate, &quot;AIs advocating for right-leaning candidates made more inaccurate claims&quot;, Rand said.</p><p>This was &quot;likely because the models mirror patterns in their training data, and numerous studies have found that right-leaning content on the internet tends to be more inaccurate&quot;, he added.</p><p>The authors recruited thousands of participants for the experiments on online gig-work platforms and warned them in advance that they would be speaking with AI.</p><p>Rand said that further work could investigate the &quot;upper limit&quot; of just how far AI can change people&#x27;s minds -- and how newer models released since the fieldwork, such as GPT-5 or Google&#x27;s Gemini 3, would perform.</p><div><br/></div><div><strong>© Agence France-Presse</strong></div><div><br/></div><div><strong>.</strong></div>

<p>A brief conversation with a partisan AI chatbot can influence voters' political views, studies published Thursday found, with evidence-backed arguments—true or not—proving particularly persuasive.</p>

A brief conversation with a partisan AI chatbot can influence voters' political views, studies published Thursday found, with evidence-backed arguments—true or not—proving particularly persuasive.

AI chatbots can influence voters: studies

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AI chatbots can influence voters: studies

Tom Barfield,

Agence France-Presse

Published December 05, 2025 08:26 AM PHT

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Updated December 05, 2025 08:28 AM PHT

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