NBC News: “Artificial intelligence chatbots are very good at changing peoples’ political opinions, according to a study published Thursday, and are particularly persuasive when they use inaccurate information. The researchers used a crowd-sourcing website to find nearly 77,000 people to participate in the study and paid them to interact with various AI chatbots, including some using AI models from OpenAI, Meta and xAI. The researchers asked for people’s views on a variety of political topics, such as taxes and immigration, and then, regardless of whether the participant was conservative or liberal, a chatbot tried to change their mind to an opposing view. The researchers found not only that the AI chatbots often succeeded, but also that some persuasion strategies worked better than others. “Our results demonstrate the remarkable persuasive power of conversational AI systems on political issues,” lead author Kobi Hackenburg, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, said in a statement about the study. The study is part of a growing body of research into how AI could affect politics and democracy, and it comes as politicians, foreign governments and others are trying to figure out how they can apply AI to sway public opinion. The paper, published in the journal Science, found that AI chatbots were most persuasive when they provided study participants with large amounts of in-depth information, rather than when they deployed alternate debating tactics such as appeals to morality or arguments personalized to the individual. The implication, according to researchers, is that AI chatbots could “exceed the persuasiveness of even elite human persuaders, given their unique ability to generate large quantities of information almost instantaneously during conversation,” the researchers wrote, although they did not put AI chatbots head-to-head against human debaters. But the study also said that the persuasiveness of AI chatbots wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up: Within the reams of information the chatbots provided as answers, researchers wrote that they discovered many inaccurate assertions. “The most persuasive models and prompting strategies tended to produce the least accurate information,” the researchers wrote…”

See also Fast Company – 10 ways I use AI to be a better journalist. From scanning the news to polishing drafts, here’s how I’ve woven AI into the process while still keeping the final voice my own.