Study: Can Chatbots get People to Change their Vote?

"Roughly one in 10 participants in a study said they would change their vote in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland after talking with a chatbot. The AI models took the role of a gentle, if firm, interlocutor, offering arguments and evidence in favor of the candidate they represented. 'If you could do that at scale,' the senior author on the study said, 'it would really change the outcome of elections.'” -The Atlantic

18 Articles about AI & Politics

New York Signs AI Safety Bill Into Law, Ignoring Trump Executive Order - Wall Street Journal

Israel reportedly using facial recognition and Google Photos to conduct mass surveillance in Gaza - Mashable

“Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed with the help of AI - CyberNews 

If U.S.-China AI Rivalry Were Football, the Score Would Be 24-18 – Wall Street Journal

Chatbots Are Surprisingly Effective at Swaying Voters - The Atlantic  

Senators Investigate Role of A.I. Data Centers in Rising Electricity Costs – New York Time 

Trump Clears Sale of More Powerful Nvidia A.I. Chips to China - New York Times 

Cheap and powerful AI campaigns target voters in India – Rest of World  

Putin Wanted AI Supremacy. Now Russia Is Struggling to Stay in the Race. - Wall Street Journal

AI may discriminate against you at work. Some states are making it illegal. – Washington Post  

A growing share of America’s hottest AI startups have turned to open Chinese AI models – NBC News 

How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights - Australian Strategic Policy Institute

New rule targets AI discrimination. Here’s what workers need to know. - Washington Post 

Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends - New York Times

China’s AI warpath – Politico

AI Enters the Classroom at the Marine War College – Military.com 

US to mandate AI vendors measure political bias for federal sales – Reuters  

AI-generated political videos are more about memes and money than persuading and deceiving – The Conversation

24 Articles about AI & Politics

New AI battle: White House vs. Anthropic - Axis

The AI dilemma: To compete with China, the U.S. needs Chinese talent – Rest of World  

China now leads the U.S. in this key part of the AI race – Washington Post 

Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? – The Atlantic

Public figures used to be off-limits in AI-generated video. A new Tow Center analysis shows how platforms are normalizing the practice. – Columbia Journalism Review  

Morgan Stanley warns the AI boom may be running out of steam - Quartz 

America is now one big bet on AI – The Financial Times

There Are Two Economies: A.I. and Everything Else – New York Times

AI is reshaping childhood in China – Rest of World

Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia – The Verge

A.I. Is Driving a Stock Market Rally in China, Too - New York Times

Police are drowning in data. Could a chatbot help? – Washington Post

One Law Sets South Korea’s AI Policy—and One Weak Link Could Break It – ITIF

Chasing AGI could backfire for US, experts say – Semafor   

How the Trump administration is using AI to ramp up immigration enforcement - CNN

China's DeepSeek AI publishes peer-reviewed study finding its AI model R1 did not rely on rival models like ChatGPT for training – Yahoo News

Uncommon bonds: Cracking down on AI chatbots – Semafor  

Inside Democrats' emerging AI playbook – Axios  

Meta created its own super PAC to politically kneecap its AI rivals – The Verge

Albania appoints AI bot as minister to tackle corruption – Yahoo News  

Regulators Are Digging Into A.I. Chatbots and Child Safety - New York Times

A short-term profit grab risks eroding America’s biggest advantage in the AI race. - Washington Post

Silicon Valley Launches Pro-AI PACs to Defend Industry in Midterm Elections – Wall Street Journal  

Do AI Companies Actually Care About America? – The Atlantic

China's AI Lead

"China has taken a commanding lead in the exploding field of artificial intelligence (AI) research, despite U.S. restrictions on exporting key computing chips to its rival, finds a new report. In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055). U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating." -Science.org

21 Recent Articles about Politics & AI

Washington lawmakers weigh new artificial intelligence regulations - PBS

Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance - Washington Post 

AI systems with ‘unacceptable risk’ are now banned in the EU – Tech Crunch 

Will AI Regulation “Avoid Past Mistakes” or Just Make Different Ones? - Information Technology & Innovation Foundation 

Legal challenges await OpenAI chief as he visits India on global tour – Washington Post

The Manhattan Project Was Secret. Should America’s AI Work Be Too? - Wall Street Journal

Is China winning the AI race? – Washington Post  

Stunning breakthroughs from China's DeepSeek AI alarm U.S. rivals – Axios

The global struggle over how to regulate AI – Rest of World

South Carolina to Reboot Giant Nuclear Project to Meet AI Demand - Wall Street Journal

Trump Announces Private-Sector $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Investment – Unite 

Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack – Washington Post  

China's AI keeps getting better — and cheaper – Axios

Joe Biden signs executive order to speed AI data center construction – The Verge

Sam Altman on ChatGPT’s First Two Years, Elon Musk and AI Under Trump – Bloomberg

A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead – Wired

Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. – Washington Post

Don’t Look Now, but China’s AI Is Catching Up Fast - Wall Street Journal  

Behind the Curtain: A chilling, "catastrophic" warning – Axios

House AI Report Lays the Foundation for a Clear, Credible U.S. Vision on AI Governance – Data Innovation

Generative AI bias poses risk to democratic values, research suggests – Phys.org

18 Articles about Politics & AI

The dos and don’ts of campaigning with AI – Washington Post

Nervous about falling behind the GOP, Democrats are wrestling with how to use AI — Associated Press

Deepfakes of Bollywood stars spark worries of AI meddling in India election – Reuters

AI sharpens political targeting in US presidential race – Voice of America

An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes – New York Times

What is propaganda? What's a deep fake? And can they influence elections? – Tennessean  

In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024 - Washington Post

Political operative and firms behind Biden AI robocall sued for thousands - The Guardian

‘Inflection point’: AI meme wars hit India election, test social platforms – Al Jazeera

Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide – Associated Press

With elections looming worldwide, here’s how to identify and investigate AI audio deepfakes – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Underdog Who Beat Biden in American Samoa Used AI in Election Campaign – Wall Street Journal  

AI call quiz: see if you can spot the sham audio of Trump and Biden – The Guardian

Fake images made to show Trump with Black supporters highlight concerns around AI and elections – Associated Press   

How AI-generated disinformation might impact this year’s elections and how journalists should report on it – Reuters Institute

San Francisco Chronicle AI will shake up democracy — for better or worse – SF Chronicle

FBI warns that foreign adversaries could use AI to spread disinformation about US elections - Washington Post 

AI Threatens Elections by Capitalizing on Human Foibles, Officials Warn – Wall Street Journal

The 3 Things Far-Right & Far-Left Political News Sources have in Common

When researchers analyzed almost 6,000 political news stories produced by partisan and nonpartisan media outlets in 2021, three things became clear:

  • Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets.

  • Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote at a higher reading level.

  • Far-right and far-left outlets took a more negative tone than nonpartisan outlets. They generally had a lower ratio of positive to negative words.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper forthcoming in Journalism Studies, “At the Extremes: Assessing Readability, Grade Level, Sentiment, and Tone in US Media Outlets.”

Read the full article from Journalist’s Resources here.

the strongest political bias of all

The strongest bias in American politics is not a liberal bias or a conservative bias; it is a confirmation bias, or the urge to believe only things that confirm what you already believe to be true. Not only do we tend to seek out and remember information that reaffirms what we already believe, but there is also a “backfire effect,” which sees people doubling down on their beliefs after being presented with evidence that contradicts them. So, where do we go from here? There’s no simple answer, but the only way people will start rejecting falsehoods being fed to them is by confronting uncomfortable truths.

Emma Roller writing in the New York Times