AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements

“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. 

For the Nature paper, the researchers recruited more than 2,300 participants to engage in a conversation with a chatbot two months…