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. My name is Ashley, and I'm an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels's run for Congress," the calls began. 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 party. 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.

Turns out many believers do respond positively when presented with the right evidence and arguments. It's become a truism that facts alone don't change people's minds. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to conspiracy theories: Many people believe that you can't talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. It turns out that many conspiracy believers respond to evidence and arguments--information that is now easy to deliver in the form of a tailored conversation with an AI chatbot. In research we published in the journal this year, we had over 2,000 conspiracy believers engage in a roughly eight-minute conversation with DebunkBot, a model we built on top of OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo (the most up-to-date GPT model at that time). Participants began by writing out, in their own words, a conspiracy theory that they believed and the evidence that made the theory compelling to them.