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 before the 2024 US presidential election. The chatbot, which was trained to advocate for either one of the top two candidates, was surprisingly persuasive, especially when discussing candidates’ policy platforms on issues such as the economy and health care. Donald Trump supporters who chatted with an AI model favoring Kamala Harris became slightly more inclined to support Harris, moving 3.9 points toward her on a 100-point scale. That was roughly four times the measured effect of political advertisements during the 2016 and 2020 elections. The AI model favoring Trump moved Harris supporters 2.3 points toward Trump.

In similar experiments conducted during the lead-ups to the 2025 Canadian federal election and the 2025 Polish presidential election, the team found an even larger effect. The chatbots shifted opposition voters’ attitudes by about 10 points.

Long-standing theories of politically motivated reasoning hold that partisan voters are impervious to facts and evidence that contradict their beliefs. But the researchers found that the chatbots, which used a range of models including variants of GPT and DeepSeek, were more persuasive when they were instructed to use facts and evidence than when they were told not to do so. “People are updating on the basis of the facts and information that the model is providing to them,” says Thomas Costello, a psychologist at American University, who worked on the project.

The catch is, some of the “evidence” and “facts” the chatbots presented were untrue. Across all three countries, chatbots advocating for right-leaning candidates made a larger number of inaccurate claims than those advocating for left-leaning candidates. The underlying models are trained on vast amounts of human-written text, which means they reproduce real-world phenomena—including “political communication that comes from the right, which tends to be less accurate,” according to studies of partisan social media posts, says Costello.

In the other study published this week, in Science, an overlapping team of researchers investigated what makes these chatbots so persuasive. They deployed 19 LLMs to interact with nearly 77,000 participants from the UK on more than 700 political issues while varying factors like computational power, training techniques, and rhetorical strategies.

The most effective way to make the models persuasive was to instruct them to pack their arguments with facts and evidence and then give them additional training by feeding them examples of persuasive conversations. In fact, the most persuasive model shifted participants who initially disagreed with a political statement 26.1 points toward agreeing. “These are really large treatment effects,” says Kobi Hackenburg, a research scientist at the UK AI Security Institute, who worked on the project.