AI chatbots can influence voters in major elections more effectively than conventional campaigning and advertising, according to a study published on December 4th, 2025, in Nature. The authors tested AI's conversational capabilities in the context of three real-word elections: the 2024 American presidential election, the 2025 Polish presidential election and the 2025 Canadian federal election. The findings reveal that, if left unchecked, AI can create unprecedented challenges for electoral integrity.
In the US context, the study's authors found that Donald Trump supporters who chatted with a pro-Harris AI model shifted 3.9 points towards Harris on a 100-point scale—roughly four times the measured effect of political advertisements during the 2016 and 2020 elections—while the pro-Trump model moved Harris supporters 2.3 points in his direction. Experiments conducted before Canadian and Polish elections showed even stronger effects, with AI swaying voters' opinions by, on average, 10 percentage points. Regarding heterogenous effects, while basic prompts encouraging bots to persuade moved opinions by 8.3 percentage points, prompting them to present high-quality facts and evidence was 27 per cent more effect. David Rand, a senior author and professor at Cornell University, noted that these findings challenge the prevailing logic that changing people's minds about politics is exceedingly difficult.
The research raises profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections, with experts emphasising that helping people recognise how these machines can both persuade and misinform is vital for societal health. The findings underscore the need for greater awareness of AI's persuasive capabilities as generative models become increasingly sophisticated and accessible.
Sources:
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03975-9
2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1128824/ai-chatbots-can-sway-voters-better-than-political-advertisements/
3. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chatbots-facts-falsehood-sway-voters-ai
4. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-chatbots-shown-to-sway-voters-raising-new-fears-about-election-influence/
