By David Ingram
Publication Date: 2025-12-04 19:00:00
Artificial intelligence chatbots are very good at changing people’s political opinions and are particularly persuasive when they use inaccurate information, according to a study published Thursday.
The researchers used a crowdsourcing website to find nearly 77,000 people to participate in the study and paid them to interact with various AI chatbots, including some that used AI models from OpenAI, Meta and xAI. The researchers asked people their opinions on various political issues such as taxes and immigration, and then a chatbot attempted to change the participant’s opinion to an opposite opinion, regardless of whether the participant was conservative or liberal.
The researchers found not only that the AI chatbots were often successful, but also that some persuasion strategies worked better than others.
“Our results demonstrate the remarkable persuasive power of conversational AI systems on political issues,” said lead author Kobi Hackenburg, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, in a…
