Artificial Intelligence Changes Canadian Voter Patterns More Than Any Other Studied Country

But don't take my word for it:

Conversations between humans and AI chatbots can significantly influence voters’ decisions, with the impact in Canada potentially three times greater than in the United States, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Dec. 4.

The study, conducted by researchers from MIT and other universities in Canada, Poland, and the United States, analyzed how conversations with AI chatbots could persuade people to change their voting intentions more effectively than traditional political advertisements.

In an experiment with Canadian voters ahead of this year’s federal election, the researchers found that AI chatbots could influence some participants to switch their preference between the country’s two leading parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, with their effect being greater among those who did not already support the party being promoted.

Researchers performed similar experiments with voters in the context of the 2024 U.S. presidential election and this year’s Polish presidential election, obtaining similar results.

“Our results unambiguously demonstrate across three different countries, with different electoral systems, that dialogues with language models can meaningfully change voter attitudes and voting intentions,” reads the paper.

“This observation has implications for the future of political persuasion, political advertising and (more broadly) democracy.”

The experiment with Canadian voters was conducted the week before the April 28 federal election and involved 1,530 participants, each of whom could choose the policy most important to them for discussion. Researchers randomized the AI chatbot’s approach, instructing it either to persuade using facts and evidence or to rely on analogies and general arguments.

Researchers found that the chatbot’s persuasive effects among Canadian voters were nearly three times larger than those observed among American voters, and that the effects diminished when the AI was prompted not to use facts. Similarly, the influence over Polish voters was almost three times greater than in the U.S. experiment.

 

Tell me again that non-Canadian voters were hoodwinked.