A conversation with a chatbot can shift people's political views—but the most persuasive models also spread the most misinformation.

A multi-university team of researchers has 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.
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optimizing persuasiveness came at the cost of truthfulness. When the models became more persuasive, they increasingly provided misleading or false information—and no one is sure why. “It could be that as the models learn to deploy more and more facts, they essentially reach to the bottom of the barrel of stuff they know, so the facts get worse-quality,” says Hackenburg.