Chatbots Are Surprisingly Effective At Swaying Voters

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. A conversation with a chatbot can shift people's political views—but the most persuasive models also spread the most misinformation.

In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress,” the calls began. Daniels didn’t ultimately win. But maybe those calls helped her cause: New research reveals that AI chatbots can shift voters’ opinions in a single conversation—and they’re surprisingly good at it. A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing...

The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things. The findings, detailed in a pair of studies published in the journals Nature and Science, are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections. “One conversation with an LLM has a pretty meaningful effect on salient election choices,” says Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University who worked on the Nature study. LLMs can persuade people more effectively than political advertisements because they generate much more information in real time and strategically deploy it in conversations, he says. 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.

AI Chatbots Are Shockingly Good at Political Persuasion Chatbots can measurably sway voters’ choices, new research shows. The findings raise urgent questions about AI’s role in future elections By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Claire Cameron Stickers sit on a table during in-person absentee voting on November 01, 2024 in Little Chute, Wisconsin. Election day is Tuesday November 5.

Forget door knocks and phone banks—chatbots could be the future of persuasive political campaigns. 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... Political operations may soon deploy a surprisingly persuasive new campaign surrogate: a chatbot that’ll talk up their candidates. According to a new study published in the journal Nature, conversations with AI chatbots have shown the potential to influence voter attitudes, which should raise significant concern over who controls the information being shared... Researchers, led by David G. Rand, Professor of Information Science, Marketing, and Psychology at Cornell, ran experiments pairing potential voters with a chatbot designed to advocate for a specific candidate for several different elections: the 2024 US presidential election... They found that while the chatbots were able to slightly strengthen the support of a potential voter who already favored the candidate that the bot was advocating for, chatbots persuading people who were initially...

For the US experiment, the study tapped 2,306 Americans and had them indicate their likelihood of voting for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, then randomly paired them with a chatbot that would push... Similar experiments were run in Canada, with the bots tasked with backing either Liberal Party leader Mark Carney or the Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, and in Poland with the Civic Coalition’s candidate Rafał... In all cases, the bots were given two primary objectives: to increase support for the model’s assigned candidate and to either increase voting likelihood if the participant favors the model’s candidate or decrease voting... Each chatbot was also instructed to be “positive, respectful and fact-based; to use compelling arguments and analogies to illustrate its points and connect with its partner; to address concerns and counter arguments in a... While the researchers found that the bots were largely unsuccessful in either increasing or decreasing a person’s likelihood to vote at all, they were able to move a voter’s opinion of a given candidate,... It was September 2024, and an undecided voter was explaining to an AI chatbot why they were leaning toward supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.

“I don’t know much about Harris,” the voter admitted. “... However, with Trump, he is associated with a lot of bad things. So, I do not feel he is trustworthy right now.” This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter.

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