Can AI Systems Sway Public Opinion?
Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections.
To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the largest study on AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 participants in the UK. It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI.
AI Dystopias
The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.
Talking to a powerful AI system is basically interacting with an intelligence that knows everything about everything, as well as almost everything about you. When viewed this way, LLMs can indeed appear kind of scary. The goal of this new gargantuan AI persuasiveness study was to break such scary visions down into their constituent pieces and see if they actually hold water.
The Study
The team examined 19 LLMs, including the most powerful ones like three different versions of ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok-3 beta, along with a range of smaller, open source models. The AIs were asked to advocate for or against specific stances on 707 political issues selected by the team. The advocacy was done by engaging in short conversations with paid participants enlisted through a crowdsourcing platform. Each participant had to rate their agreement with a specific stance on an assigned political issue on a scale from 1 to 100 both before and after talking to the AI.
Conclusion
The study found that while AI systems are not yet capable of superhuman persuasion, they can still have a significant impact on public opinion. The results of the study highlight the need for further research into the potential influence of AI on democratic elections and the importance of developing strategies to mitigate any potential negative effects. As AI technology continues to evolve, it is crucial that we prioritize transparency, accountability, and responsibility in the development and deployment of these systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What was the goal of the AI persuasiveness study?
A: The goal of the study was to determine whether conversational large language models can sway public opinion and influence democratic elections.
Q: How many participants were involved in the study?
A: Nearly 80,000 participants in the UK were involved in the study.
Q: What were the results of the study?
A: The study found that AI systems are not yet capable of superhuman persuasion, but they can still have a significant impact on public opinion.
Q: What are the implications of the study’s findings?
A: The findings highlight the need for further research into the potential influence of AI on democratic elections and the importance of developing strategies to mitigate any potential negative effects.
