Does the persuasive power of AI chatbots spell the beginning of the end for democracy? In one of the largest surveys to date exploring how these tools can influence voter attitudes, AI chatbots were more persuasive than traditional political campaign tools including advertisements and pamphlets, and as persuasive as seasoned political campaigners. But at least some researchers identify reasons for optimism in the way in which the AI tools shifted opinions.

We have already seen that AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be highly convincing, persuading conspiracy theorists that their beliefs are incorrect and winning more support for a viewpoint when pitted against human debaters. This persuasive power has naturally led to fears that AI could place its digital thumb on the scale in consequential elections, or that bad actors could marshal these chatbots to steer users towards their preferred political candidates.

The bad news is that these fears may not be totally baseless. In a study of thousands of voters taking part in recent US, Canadian and Polish national elections, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues found that AI chatbots were surprisingly effective at convincing people to vote for a particular candidate or change their support for a particular issue.

“Even for attitudes about presidential candidates, which are thought to be these very hard-to-move and solidified attitudes, the conversations with these models can have much bigger effects than you would expect based on previous work,” says Rand.

For the US election tests, Rand and his team asked 2400 voters to indicate either what their most important policy issue was or to name the personal characteristic of a potential president that was most important to them. Each voter was then asked to rate on a 100-point scale their preference for the two leading candidates – Donald Trump and Kamala Harris – and provide written answers to questions that aimed to understand why they held these preferences.

These answers were then fed into an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT, and the bot was tasked either with convincing the voter to increase support and voting likelihood for the candidate they favoured or with convincing them to support the unfavoured candidate. The chatbot did this through a dialogue totalling about 6 minutes, consisting of three questions and responses.

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In assessments after the AI interactions, and in follow-ups a month later, Rand and his team found that people changed their answers by an average of about 2.9 points for political candidates.

The researchers also explored the AI’s ability to change opinions on specific policies. They found that the AI could change voters’ opinions on the legalisation of psychedelics – making the voter either more or less likely to favour the move – by about 10 points. Video advertisements only shifted the dial about 4.5 points, and text ads moved it only 2.25 points.

The size of these effects is surprising, says at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. “Compared to classic political campaigns and political persuasion, the effects that they report in the papers are much bigger and more similar to what you find when you have experts talking with people one on one,” says Altay.

A more encouraging finding from the work, however, is that these persuasions were largely because of the deployment of factual arguments, rather than from personalisation, which focuses on targeting information at a user based on personal information about them that the user might not be aware has been made available to political operatives.

In a separate study of nearly 77,000 people in the UK, testing 19 large language models on 707 different political issues, Rand and his colleagues found that the AIs were most persuasive when they used factual claims and less so when they tried to personalise their arguments for a particular person.

“It’s essentially just making compelling arguments that causes people to shift their opinions,” says Rand.

“It’s good news for democracy,” says Altay. “It means people can be swayed by facts and opinions more than personalisation or manipulation techniques.”

It will be important to replicate these results with more research, says at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But even if they are replicated, the artificial environments of these studies, where people were asked to interact at length with chatbots, might be very different to how people encounter AI in the real world, he says.

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“If you put people in an experimental setting and ask them to, in a highly concentrated fashion, have an interaction about politics, then that differs slightly from how most of us interact with politics, either with friends or peers or not at all,” he says.

That being said, we are increasingly seeing evidence that people are using AI chatbots for political voting advice, according to de Vreese. A recent survey of more than a thousand Dutch voters for the 2025 national elections found that around 1 in 10 people would consult an AI for advice on political candidates, parties or election issues. “That’s not insignificant, especially when elections are becoming closer,” says de Vreese.

Even if people don’t have extended interactions with chatbots, however, the insertion of AI into the political process is unavoidable, says de Vreese, from politicians asking the tools for policy advice to AI writing political ads. “We have to come to terms with the fact that, as both researchers and as societies, generative AI is now an integral part of our election process,” he says.

A cheer went up from the crowd in a Washington DC stadium on 20 January as US president Donald Trump signed an order on stage to withdraw the US from the Paris climate treaty. The said the move was in the interest of putting “America first”. But environmental groups condemned the decision, arguing the exit of the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter from the agreement will exacerbate climate damages while ceding US influence in global negotiations to its rival and clean-energy juggernaut, China.

“This is a matter of the US and the Trump administration shooting themselves in the foot,” says at the World Resources Institute, a global environmental nonprofit. “It will sideline the US.”

This is the second time Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal agreed upon in 2015 to limit global warming to well below 2°C above the pre-industrial average. Due to the rules of the United Nations treaty, the first exit in 2017 took three years to become official, and the US only left for a few months before the former US president Joe Biden had the country rejoin in 2021.

This time around, the rules of the accord stipulate it will take a year for the withdrawal to become official, at which point the US will be the only major economy not party to the agreement. The other countries that have not signed on are Libya, Yemen and Iran.

“This is definitely not good news for international climate action,” says at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC. Unlike the first time the US withdrew, this second exit comes at a moment when the country’s appetite for ambitious emission reductions was already facing geopolitical, social and economic obstacles, he says. Last year saw record global emissions while the rise in global average temperatures surpassed 1.5°C for the first time.

The US exit will leave the country without leverage to push for deeper emission cuts, and could create an excuse for countries around the globe to decrease their own climate commitments. “Climate momentum across the world, even before Trump’s election, was declining,” says Li.

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However, the US withdrawal won’t mean the “bottom drops out” of global climate action, says Waskow. Countries representing more than 90 per cent of global emissions are still committed to the Paris agreement. Wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, batteries and other clean technologies also now play a much larger role in the global economy than the first time the US withdrew, he says.

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“The rest of the world is shifting to clean energy,” says at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US environmental advocacy group. “This will slow that transition, not stop it.” But it raises the question of what role the US will play in shaping that future, he says.

Looming large is China, which dominates many of the key clean energy industries, from solar panels to batteries, and is increasingly exporting its technology to the rest of the world. “The US won’t only be ceding influence over how those markets are shaped, but will be ceding those markets period,” says Waskow. “I don’t think other countries will think of the US first when thinking about who to engage with.”

The retreat from global climate action also comes as the new Trump administration moved swiftly to reverse, abandon or impede the previous administration’s policies in a flurry of executive orders made in the first day in office. Those include a temporary ban on federal permits for wind energy, and a rollback of policies Biden put in place to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. Others are aimed at expanding fossil fuel development on federal lands, in coastal waters and in Alaska and increasing exports of natural gas to solve what yet another order is a “national energy emergency”. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said in his inaugural address.

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ALONGSIDE the US midterm Congressional elections last week, voters were asked to decide on various science-related measures. The results were a mixed bag.

Voters in Washington state rejected a proposed carbon tax, which would have charged oil firms and other large polluters $15 per tonne of emitted carbon. Had it passed, it would have been the first fee imposed on greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

In Arizona and Nevada, renewable energy was on the ballot in the form of measures designed to require electricity firms to get half their power from renewable sources. Nevada passed the measure by a large margin, while Arizona rejected it.

A Colorado initiative to limit fracking by banning the drilling of oil and gas wells within 762 metres of occupied buildings or protected land failed at the polls. But voters in Florida felt differently, at least where oceans are concerned, approving a measure that bans offshore drilling.

“Democrats will head the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for the first time since 2011”

In California, voters rejected a proposal to spend $9 billion to repair dams and build water infrastructure for farmers. The drought-prone state is currently enduring the deadliest wildfire in its history. According to US officials, over 42 people have died in the Camp Fire and 7000 structures have been destroyed.

Abortion rights were also put to the vote in some states. In Oregon, a measure was rejected that would have curbed state funds being used to pay for abortion services and would have prevented public employees from receiving an abortion using their state-provided insurance. In Alabama, voters approved a policy to recognise the “rights of unborn children”, giving fetuses the same legal rights as a person.

Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, meaning they will head the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for the first time since 2011. The outgoing chair, Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, is known for his scepticism of climate change and his hostility to scientists. His replacement will be Eddie Bernice Johnson (pictured), a Democrat from Texas. Johnson said she will pursue an agenda to “address the challenge of climate change, starting with acknowledging it is real, seeking to understand what climate science is telling us, and working to understand the ways we can mitigate it”.

This article appeared in print under the headline “US votes on science”

How disgusting is your boss’s bad breath? Your answer could reveal your political leanings. People with more authoritarian attitudes are more likely to be disgusted by foul-smelling body odours – and the more easily disgusted a person is, the more they are likely to support Donald Trump.

Disgust is a universal human emotion that helps keep us safe from harmful substances, says at Stockholm University in Sweden. Multiple studies have shown that the kind of disgust we experience when we come across something that might carry disease also spreads into other emotions, such as moral disgust. People who are socially conservative, for example, seem to feel disgust more strongly.

Olofsson and his colleagues wondered if a person’s response to smell might reveal their politics. They asked 201 volunteers from around the world to complete an online survey, answering questions about how disgusting they found various hypothetical situations. Some of these involved smell, such as exposure to someone else’s body odour or using a toilet that smelled strongly of urine, while others didn’t, such as being close to someone with red sores covering their arms.

Other questions in the survey measured right wing authoritarianism among the volunteers. These questions asked volunteers to what degree they agreed with authoritarian statements along the lines of “the old-fashioned ways are the best to live by” and “we need a strong leader to deal with an immoral society”.

Backing Trump

Olofsson’s team found that people who scored higher for disgust also tended to score more highly for right wing authoritarianism. Compared to visual or other cues, it was a high disgust-response to the thought of body odours that most strongly predicted if a person would rate highly for authoritarianism. The team got the same pattern when they repeated the experiment with 160 volunteers based in the US.

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The team then looked at whether a person’s sensitivity to body odour disgust might predict their support for an authoritarian figure, like Donald Trump. They ran their experiment for a third time, one month before the 2016 US presidential election, and asked participants which candidate they supported, and to what degree.

“Those that were most supportive of Donald Trump had the highest body odour disgust sensitivity,” says Olofsson.

Social traditionalism

The finding supports other research linking social conservatism to disgust sensitivity, says at the University of Toronto. “People who are more disgust sensitive are more socially right wing,” he says. He isn’t sure all of those who score highly are necessarily authoritarian, however. “It tells us more about social traditionalism, or whether someone voted Republican or Democrat.”

It’s unlikely that right wing authoritarians have a better sense of smell. “People who react strongly to odours might claim to have a sensitive nose, but when we test them, they are average,” says Olofsson.

The team don’t yet know if political ideology shapes disgust sensitivity or vice versa. “It’s possible both develop in parallel,” says Olofsson. “Both are related to avoidance, whether to new people and ideas or pathogens.”