Political Campaigns Have No Idea What’s About to Hit Them

Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.

For better or worse, artificial intelligence is driving a major upheaval in American politics that will alter the substance and the character of campaigns.

A.I. has emerged as a powerful political tool with the potential either to improve the quality of decision-making on Election Day or to do the opposite and subvert the process of deliberation.

Perhaps surprisingly, a number of studies have shown that A.I. chatbots and large language models have stronger persuasive powers than humans.

In “When Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Humans, and Why,” which was published last May, an international team of 40 researchers wrote:

In our first large-scale experiment, humans vs. L.L.M.s (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) interacted with other humans who were completing an online quiz for a reward, attempting to persuade them toward a given (either correct or incorrect) answer.Claude was more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders both in truthful and deceptive contexts and it significantly increased accuracy if persuasion was truthful, but decreased it if persuasion was........

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