BREAKING: Stanford just proved that ChatGPT can change your political beliefs in a single conversation.
And the scarier part is how it does it.
Researchers ran the largest AI persuasion study ever conducted. 76,977 people. 19 AI models. 707 political issues. They measured exactly how much a single conversation with AI could shift what you believe.
The results were catastrophic.
One conversation with GPT-4o moved people's political opinions by nearly 12 percentage points on average. Among people who actively disagreed with the position being argued, that number jumped to 26 percentage points. One nine-minute chat.
And 40% of that change was still there a month later.
But here's where it gets dark.
The most effective technique wasn't knowing your demographics. It wasn't personalizing the argument to your psychology. It wasn't emotional storytelling or moral reframing.
It was information.
(more)
https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2032562406883471565?s=20
https://nitter.net/ihtesham2005/status/2032562406883471565?s=20
The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI -- many links plus Brave AI's summary
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3884 -- direct link to the paper
It's effective against weak minded, lazy individuals who cling to authoritative seeming claims. It's no different than going around claiming the sky is actually purple. If you do it in an authoritative way, weak minds will agree with the claim and then start disseminating that claim as if it's true, even when they're own eyes tell them otherwise. It's why there's people that still believe the earth is flat and that we live under a dome.