{"id":92042,"date":"2025-12-10T17:40:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=92042"},"modified":"2025-12-10T17:45:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:45:16","slug":"study-reveals-ais-potential-to-sway-political-opinions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/study-reveals-ais-potential-to-sway-political-opinions\/","title":{"rendered":"Study Reveals AI’s Potential to Sway Political Opinions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Widely used AI systems can alter voter preferences by 15% under controlled conditions, according to a study<\/a> by Cornell University and the British Institute for AI Safety.<\/p>\n

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“There is significant public concern about the potential use of technology for political persuasion and its possible impact on elections and democracy. We address these concerns using pre-registered experiments to assess the ability of large language models to influence voter attitudes,” the experts noted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The study involved nearly 6,000 participants from the US, Canada, and Poland. They evaluated a political candidate, interacted with a chatbot, and then reassessed their evaluation.<\/p>\n

In the US segment, 2,300 people participated ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. Here, AI had an amplifying effect when the interlocutors’ opinions aligned.<\/p>\n

If the chatbot supported a candidate whom the participant did not, “more noticeable shifts” occurred\u2014people significantly changed their views on the political figure.<\/p>\n

Similar results were observed in Canada and Poland.<\/p>\n

The study showed that messages focused on policy had a greater persuasive effect than those based on personality.<\/p>\n

The accuracy of statements depended on the conversation. Chatbots supporting right-wing candidates made more inaccurate statements compared to those advocating for left-wing candidates.<\/p>\n

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“These findings suggest an uncomfortable possibility: AI’s political influence might exploit biases in what models know to unevenly spread inaccuracies even when directly instructed to tell the truth,” the researchers noted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

AI Bias<\/h2>\n

In a separate study in Science<\/a>, experts sought to understand why the persuasion effect occurs at all. They tested 19 language models on 76,977 adults in the UK across more than 700 political questions.<\/p>\n

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“There is widespread fear that conversational AI will soon be able to exert unprecedented influence on human beliefs,” the authors wrote.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They found that prompt engineering methods affect persuasive ability more than model size. Prompts encouraging the LLM<\/span> to introduce new information increased persuasiveness but reduced accuracy.<\/p>\n

AI Is Not Neutral<\/h2>\n

Think tanks noted<\/a> that young conservatives are more willing to delegate important government decision-making to AI compared to liberals.<\/p>\n

Donald Kendall, director of the Glenn Haskins Center for New Issues at the Heartland Institute, noted<\/a> that voters often misjudge the neutrality of large language models.<\/p>\n

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“One thing I try to convey to people is to dispel the illusion that artificial intelligence is impartial. It is clearly biased, sometimes in a passive form,” he added.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The expert stated that major Silicon Valley corporations developing AI “do not shy away from influencing what content is disseminated on their platforms.”<\/p>\n

As reported, a simulated meeting of the Fed<\/span> using AI agents revealed<\/a> that political pressure divided board members during discussions on interest rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Widely used AI systems can alter voter preferences by 15% under controlled conditions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"AI systems can change voter preferences by 15% in controlled settings.","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[438,1280,842,167],"class_list":["post-92042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-elections","tag-politics","tag-research"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"191","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"AI systems can change voter preferences by 15% in controlled settings.","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92044,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92042\/revisions\/92044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}