US congressional speeches are getting less evidence-based over time

The language that elected members of the US Congress use in debate increasingly includes words such as "phony" and "doubt" over words such as "proof" and "reason". This linguistic trend away from evidence in favour of intuition was revealed in an artificial intelligence analysis of millions of congressional speech transcripts. It also coincides with both greater political polarisation in Congress and a decline in the number of laws that get enacted through Congress, says Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol in the UK. How does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots "think" like us? "We can think that truth is something we can achieve based on analysis of evidence, or we can think of it as the result of intuition or'gut feeling'," says Lewandowsky. "Those notions of honesty and truth are expressed in how we use everyday language."