\n## Introduction\n\nIn 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and have conversations with them. "Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress," the calls began. Daniels didn’t ultimately win, 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.

\n## Details\n\nA multi-university team of researchers 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.

Implications\n

Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University who worked on the Nature study, says "One conversation with an LLM has a pretty meaningful effect on salient election choices." LLMs can persuade people more effectively than political advertisements because they generate much more information in real time and strategically deploy it in conversations.

Conclusion\n

The findings, detailed in a pair of studies published in the journals Nature and Science, are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections.