University of Kwazulu-Natal

Ai Is Transforming Politics Much Like Social Media Did Time

Bonisiwe Shabane
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ai is transforming politics much like social media did time

The last decade taught us painful lessons about how social media can reshape democracy: misinformation spreads faster than truth, online communities harden into echo chambers, and political divisions deepen as polarization grows. Now, another wave of technology is transforming how voters learn about elections—only faster, at scale, and with far less visibility. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others, are becoming the new vessels (and sometimes, arbiters) of political information. Our research suggests their influence is already rippling through our democracy. LLMs are being adopted at a pace that makes social media uptake look slow. At the same time, traffic to traditional news and search sites has declined.

As the 2026 midterms near, more than half of Americans now have access to AI, which can be used to gather information about candidates, issues, and elections. Meanwhile, researchers and firms are exploring the use of AI to simulate polling results or to understand how to synthesize voter opinions. These models may appear neutral—politically unbiased, and merely summarizing facts from different sources found in their training data or on the internet. At the same time, they operate as black boxes, designed and trained in ways users can’t see. Researchers are actively trying to unravel the question of whose opinions LLMs reflect. Given their immense power, prevalence, and ability to “personalize” information, these models have the potential to shape what voters believe about candidates, issues, and elections as a whole.

And we don’t yet know the extent of that influence. Chatbots now influence what voters learn about candidates and issues. Chatbots have the potential to sway democratic elections — and the most persuasive methods tend to introduce factual inaccuracies.Credit: Marcus Harrison/Alamy Artificial-intelligence chatbots can influence voters in major elections — and have a bigger effect on people’s political views than conventional campaigning and advertising. A study published today in Nature1 found that participants’ preferences in real-world elections swung by up to 15 percentage points after conversing with a chatbot. In a related paper published in Science2, researchers showed that these chatbots’ effectiveness stems from their ability to synthesize a lot of information in a conversational way.

AI is more persuasive than people in online debates The findings showcase the persuasive power of chatbots, which are used by more than one hundred million users each day, says David Rand, an author of both studies and a cognitive scientist at Cornell... A short interaction with a chatbot can meaningfully shift a voter’s opinion about a presidential candidate or proposed policy in either direction, new Cornell research finds. The potential for artificial intelligence to affect election results is a major public concern. Two new papers – with experiments conducted in four countries – demonstrate that chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are quite effective at political persuasion, moving opposition voters’ preferences by 10 percentage points... The LLMs’ persuasiveness comes not from being masters of psychological manipulation, but because they come up with so many claims supporting their arguments for candidates’ policy positions.

“LLMs can really move people’s attitudes towards presidential candidates and policies, and they do it by providing many factual claims that support their side,” said David Rand ’04, professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences, and a senior author on both papers. “But those claims aren’t necessarily accurate – and even arguments built on accurate claims can still mislead by omission.” The researchers reported these findings Dec. 4 in two papers published simultaneously, “Persuading Voters Using Human-Artificial Intelligence Dialogues,” in Nature, and “The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational Artificial Intelligence,” in Science. In the Nature study, Rand, along with co-senior author Gordon Pennycook, associate professor of psychology and the Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues, instructed...

They randomly assigned participants to engage in a back-and-forth text conversation with a chatbot promoting one side or the other and then measured any change in the participants’ opinions and voting intentions. The researchers repeated this experiment three times: in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election. A massive study of political persuasion shows AIs have, at best, a weak effect. Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections. To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the...

It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI. The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.

Talking to a powerful AI system is basically interacting with an intelligence that knows everything about everything, as well as almost everything about you. When viewed this way, LLMs can indeed appear kind of scary. The goal of this new gargantuan AI persuasiveness study was to break such scary visions down into their constituent pieces and see if they actually hold water. Co-hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer look back at the last five months of headlines as they celebrate the twentieth episode of Terms of Engagement. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer are joined by Michelle Feldman, political director at Mobile Voting, a nonprofit, nonpartisan initiative working to make voting easier with expanded access to mobile voting. Archon Fung and Stephen Richer discuss whether fusion voting expands representation and strengthens smaller parties—or whether it muddies party lines and confuses voters.

Creating a healthy digital civic infrastructure ecosystem means not just deploying technology for the sake of efficiency, but thoughtfully designing tools built to enhance democratic engagement from connection to action. Public engagement has long been too time-consuming and costly for governments to sustain, but AI offers tools to make participation more systematic and impactful. Our new Reboot Democracy Workshop Series replaces lectures with hands-on sessions that teach the practical “how-to’s” of AI-enhanced engagement. Together with leading practitioners and partners at InnovateUS and the Allen Lab at Harvard, we’ll explore how AI can help institutions tap the collective intelligence of our communities more efficiently and effectively. In the months leading up to last year’s presidential election, more than 2,000 Americans, roughly split across partisan lines, were recruited for an experiment: Could an AI model influence their political inclinations? The premise was straightforward—let people spend a few minutes talking with a chatbot designed to stump for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, then see if their voting preferences changed at all.

The bots were effective. After talking with a pro-Trump bot, one in 35 people who initially said they would not vote for Trump flipped to saying they would. The number who flipped after talking with a pro-Harris bot was even higher, at one in 21. A month later, when participants were surveyed again, much of the effect persisted. The results suggest that AI “creates a lot of opportunities for manipulating people’s beliefs and attitudes,” David Rand, a senior author on the study, which was published today in Nature, told me. Rand didn’t stop with the U.S.

general election. He and his co-authors also tested AI bots’ persuasive abilities in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland—and the effects left Rand, who studies information sciences at Cornell, “completely blown away.” In both... The AI models took the role of a gentle, if firm, interlocutor, offering arguments and evidence in favor of the candidate they represented. “If you could do that at scale,” Rand said, “it would really change the outcome of elections.” The chatbots succeeded in changing people’s minds, in essence, by brute force. A separate companion study that Rand also co-authored, published today in Science, examined what factors make one chatbot more persuasive than another and found that AI models needn’t be more powerful, more personalized, or...

Instead, chatbots were most effective when they threw fact-like claims at the user; the most persuasive AI models were those that provided the most “evidence” in support of their argument, regardless of whether that... In fact, the most persuasive chatbots were also the least accurate. Independent experts told me that Rand’s two studies join a growing body of research indicating that generative-AI models are, indeed, capable persuaders: These bots are patient, designed to be perceived as helpful, can draw... Granted, caveats exist. It’s unclear how many people would ever have such direct, information-dense conversations with chatbots about whom they’re voting for, especially when they’re not being paid to participate in a study. The studies didn’t test chatbots against more forceful types of persuasion, such as a pamphlet or a human canvasser, Jordan Boyd-Graber, an AI researcher at the University of Maryland who was not involved with...

Traditional campaign outreach (mail, phone calls, television ads, and so on) is typically not effective at swaying voters, Jennifer Pan, a political scientist at Stanford who was not involved with the research, told me. AI could very well be different—the new research suggests that the AI bots were more persuasive than traditional ads in previous U.S. presidential elections—but Pan cautioned that it’s too early to say whether a chatbot with a clear link to a candidate would be of much use. AI’s Impact on Elections: New Policy Paper Highlights Urgent Global Challenge Future Shift Labs Co-founder Sagar Vishnoi addresses IPE25 in Cape Town (Photo: Business Wire) CAPE TOWN, South Africa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming political campaigns worldwide, creating unprecedented opportunities while amplifying risks for democratic processes.

According to the newly launched policy paper, The Pervasive Influence of AI on Global Political Campaigns 2024, AI-driven techniques, such as generative AI (genAI), have revolutionized voter engagement through personalized messaging. However, genAI has also emerged as a double-edged sword: while enabling effective campaigning, it has been a significant source of disinformation, eroding trust in democratic institutions. For instance, the United States, classified as “severely polarized” and ranked 3rd among 28 countries for polarization, illustrates how AI-generated propaganda exacerbates societal divisions. Further, the U.S. ranks 1st in distrust of social media, exposing vulnerabilities to AI-driven disinformation campaigns. Russia’s Foreign Influence and Malign Interference (FIMI) activities have prominently leveraged AI tools to spread targeted propaganda.

Generative AI platforms like "Doppelganger" have repeatedly been used to sow disinformation and undermine public trust globally. The study underscores the urgent need for governments to regulate AI in elections to prevent future misuse and safeguard democratic integrity. The policy paper, authored by Alisha Butala, Dr. Christopher Nehring, and Mateusz Łabuz, was developed by Future Shift Labs, a global think tank exploring AI and governance. Officially unveiled on the 23rd of January at the IPE Campaign Expo 2025 in Cape Town, South Africa, the paper provides actionable insights and global case studies. It emphasizes the importance of clear regulations, ethical standards, and investment in public education to combat AI-enabled electoral interference.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping politics in ways we never imagined. From targeted ads to deepfake propaganda, machine learning algorithms are shaping public opinion more than ever. But how does this work, and what are the consequences? In this deep dive, we’ll explore the key ways AI is being used to influence voters, the ethical concerns surrounding its use, and what the future holds for democracy in the age of AI-driven... Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all political ads. AI-driven microtargeting allows campaigns to analyze vast amounts of data on voters’ interests, demographics, and behaviors to create hyper-personalized messaging.

For example, a swing voter in Ohio might see a Facebook ad emphasizing economic policies, while a young voter in California could receive content about climate change. The goal? To influence each person based on their specific concerns. AI doesn’t just create ads—it tests them in real-time. Machine learning algorithms analyze which wording, visuals, and emotional appeals perform best and adjust accordingly. This means campaigns can optimize persuasion strategies continuously.

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