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.

Probabilistic topic models are a powerful tool for extracting latent themes from large text datasets. In many text datasets, we also observe per-document covariates (e.g., source, style, political affiliation) that act as environments that modulate a "global" (environment-agnostic) topic representation. Accurately learning these representations is important for prediction on new documents in unseen environments and for estimating the causal effect of topics on real-world outcomes. To this end, we introduce the Multi-environment Topic Model (MTM), an unsupervised probabilistic model that separates global and environment-specific terms. Through experimentation on various political content, from ads to tweets and speeches, we show that the MTM produces interpretable global topics with distinct environment-specific words. On multi-environment data, the MTM outperforms strong baselines in and out-of-distribution. It also enables the discovery of accurate causal effects.

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of ruined cityscapes and chaos at the border. Fake robocalls purporting to be from Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the 2024 primary election. This summer, the Department of Justice cracked down on a Russian bot farm that was using AI to impersonate Americans on social media, and OpenAI disrupted an Iranian group using ChatGPT to generate fake social-media comments. It's not altogether clear what damage AI itself may cause, though the reasons for concern are obvious--the technology makes it easier for bad actors to construct highly persuasive and misleading content.

In August, X, the social media company once known as Twitter, publicly released Grok 2, the latest iteration of its AI chatbot. With limited guardrails, Grok has been responsible for pushing misinformation about elections and allowing users to make life-like artificial intelligence-generated images – otherwise known as deepfakes – of elected officials in ethically questionable positions. The social media giant has started to rectify some of its problems. After election officials in Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington wrote to X head Elon Musk alleging that the chatbot produced false information about state ballot deadlines, X now points users to Vote.gov for election-related questions. But when it comes to deepfakes, that's a different story.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Michigan is joining an effort to curb deceptive uses of artificial intelligence and manipulated media through state-level policies as Congress and the Federal Elections Commission continue to debate more sweeping regulations ahead of the 2024 elections. Campaigns on the state and federal level will be required to clearly say which political advertisements airing in Michigan were created using artificial intelligence under legislation expected to be signed in the coming days by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. It also would prohibit use of AI-generated deepfakes within 90 days of an election without a separate disclosure identifying the media as manipulated.

It's a jarring political advertisement: Images of a Chinese attack on Taiwan lead into scenes of looted banks and armed soldiers enforcing martial law in San Francisco. Those visuals in the Republican National Committee's ad aren't real, and the scenarios are pretty obviously fictional. But thanks to the handiwork of artificial intelligence, the images look like real life. Within days of the ad appearing online in April, Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, introduced legislation to require disclosure of AI-produced content in political advertisements. "This is going too far," she said in an interview.

Most of the debates surrounding advantages and drawbacks of democracy seem to be focused on issues like inefficient government, potential centralization of power, the tyranny of the majority, and so on. In fact, democracy suffers from so many deficiencies that as one great historian said, if you want to obtain a lucrative book contract, you should just propose to write a book "The Crisis of American Democracy" -- though it is worth noting that democracy, as W. Churchill famously said, is the worst system of all, except for all the others. However, with rising political polarization and governmental gridlock, another challenge is emerging -- what I call the tyranny of the independent minority. Its advent is so gradual and subtle that few people seem to notice it. Yet the tyranny of the minority will pose a threat to the most foundational ideas of democracy. Above all, the increasing use of AI in politics is going to accelerate this trend.

The Facebook logo is displayed on an iPad. WASHINGTON -- Revelations that a political data firm may have gained access to the personal information of as many as 50 million Facebook users drew new calls on Capitol Hill on Monday for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the heads of other social media companies to testify before Congress about the possible privacy breach. Two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana, asked Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., to hold a hearing so senators can publicly grill the CEOs. "Facebook, Google, and Twitter have amassed unprecedented amounts of personal data and use this data when selling advertising, including political advertisements," the senators wrote in a letter to Grassley. "The lack of oversight on how data is stored and how political advertisements are sold raises concerns about the integrity of American elections as well as privacy rights." The congressional calls for additional scrutiny come after Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had suspended a data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from operating on its platforms as it investigated whether the firm failed to delete information that Cambridge Analytica had received through an academic researcher.