David Rozado on Twitter / X

Have we been measuring AI political bias wrong? A better approach is possible.

Why ideological preferences and epistemic failure in LLMs are not the same thing — and why the difference matters

The LA Times’ Political Rating “AI” Is A Silly Joke Aimed At Validating Wealthy Media Ownership’s Inherent Bias

Late last year we wrote about how LA Times billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong confidently announced that he was going to use AI to display “artificial intelligence-generated ratings”…

People are getting their news from AI – and it’s altering their views

Even when information is factually accurate, how it’s presented can introduce subtle biases. As large language models increasingly bring people the news, this bias is a looming problem.

People are getting their news from AI – and it’s altering their views

Even when information is factually accurate, how it’s presented can introduce subtle biases. As large language models increasingly bring people the news, this bias is a looming problem.

Relying on AI chatbots for historical facts can influence your political beliefs, new study shows

A recent study in PNAS Nexus suggests that reading history summaries generated by artificial intelligence can subtly shift your political opinions. Even when factually accurate, chatbots carry hidden biases that influence how people view the world.

The AI Trust Gap: 82% Are Skeptical, Yet Only 8% Always Check Sources

Original Exploding Topics survey data explores public sentiment on AI Overviews and AI-generated content, highlighting trust, skepticism, and shifting content consumption habits.

Do AI and bogus respondents threaten polling’s future?

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation, answers some common questions about the current polling landscape in the U.S.

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION

Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.

Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite

Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms

Valerio Capraro on Twitter / X

Our new paper shows that AI destroys the wisdom of uncertainty.The willingness to say “I don’t know” collapses from 44% to 3%.This happens even when the AI’s advice is wrong. Consequently, correct answers fall from 27% to 9%.Yes: some people who would otherwise answer… pic.twitter.com/l0YZ75IFHn— Valerio Capraro (@ValerioCapraro) August 10, 2026

The left-wing case for AI

In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in 2024. If the timing had been different, we could have had a real pro-AI faction on the left. What would that look like?

The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence

There are widespread fears that conversational artificial intelligence (AI) could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. In this work, in three large-scale experiments ( N = 76,977 participants), we deployed 19 large language models (LLMs)—including some post-trained explicitly for persuasion—to evaluate their persuasiveness on 707 political issues. We then checked the factual accuracy of 466,769 resulting LLM claims. We show that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem more from post-training and prompting methods—which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51 and 27%, respectively—than from personalization or increasing model scale, which had smaller effects. We further show that these methods increased persuasion by exploiting LLMs’ ability to rapidly access and strategically deploy information and that, notably, where they increased AI persuasiveness, they also systematically decreased factual accuracy. , Editor’s summary Many fear that we are on the precipice of unprecedented manipulation by large language models (LLMs), but techniques driving their persuasiveness are poorly understood. In the initial “pretrained” phase, LLMs may exhibit flawed reasoning. Their power unlocks during vital “posttraining,” when developers refine pretrained LLMs to sharpen their reasoning and align with users’ needs. Posttraining also enables LLMs to maintain logical, sophisticated conversations. Hackenburg et al . examined which techniques made diverse, conversational LLMs most persuasive across 707 British political issues (see the Perspective by Argyle). LLMs were most persuasive after posttraining, especially when prompted to use facts and evidence (information) to argue. However, information-dense LLMs produced the most inaccurate claims, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation during rollouts of future models. —Ekeoma Uzogara , INTRODUCTION Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked widespread concerns about its potential to influence human beliefs. One possibility is that conversational AI could be used to manipulate public opinion on political issues through interactive dialogue. Despite extensive speculation, however, fundamental questions about the actual mechanisms, or “levers,” responsible for driving advances in AI persuasiveness—e.g., computational power or sophisticated training techniques—remain largely unanswered. In this work, we systematically investigate these levers and chart the horizon of persuasiveness with conversational AI. RATIONALE We considered multiple factors that could enhance the persuasiveness of conversational AI: raw computational power (model scale), specialized post-training methods for persuasion, personalization to individual users, and instructed rhetorical strategies. Across three large-scale experiments with 76,977 total UK participants, we deployed 19 large language models (LLMs) to persuade on 707 political issues while varying these factors independently. We also analyzed more than 466,000 AI-generated claims, examining the relationship between persuasiveness and truthfulness. RESULTS We found that the most powerful levers of AI persuasion were methods for post-training and rhetorical strategy (prompting), which increased persuasiveness by as much as 51 and 27%, respectively. These gains were often larger than those obtained from substantially increasing model scale. Personalizing arguments on the basis of user data had a comparatively small effect on persuasion. We observe that a primary mechanism driving AI persuasiveness was information density: Models were most persuasive when they packed their arguments with a high volume of factual claims. Notably, however, we documented a concerning trade-off between persuasion and accuracy: The same levers that made AI more persuasive—including persuasion post-training and information-focused prompting—also systematically caused the AI to produce information that was less factually accurate. CONCLUSION Our findings suggest that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem less from model scale or personalization and more from post-training and prompting techniques that mobilize an LLM’s ability to rapidly generate information during conversation. Further, we reveal a troubling trade-off: When AI systems are optimized for persuasion, they may increasingly deploy misleading or false information. This research provides an empirical foundation for policy-makers and technologists to anticipate and address the challenges of AI-driven persuasion, and it highlights the need for safeguards that balance AI’s legitimate uses in political discourse with protections against manipulation and misinformation. Persuasiveness of conversational AI increases with model scale. The persuasive impact in percentage points on the y axis is plotted against effective pretraining compute [floating-point operations (FLOPs)] on the x axis. Point estimates are persuasive effects of different AI models. Colored lines show trends for models that we uniformly chat-tuned for open-ended conversation (purple) versus those that were post-trained using heterogeneous, opaque methods by AI developers (green). pp, percentage points; CI, confidence interval.

Political Neutrality in AI Is Impossible- But Here Is How to Approximate It

AI systems often exhibit political bias, influencing users' opinions and decisions. While political neutrality-defined as the absence of bias-is often seen as an ideal solution for fairness and safety, this position paper argues that true political neutrality is neither feasible nor universally desirable due to its subjective nature and the biases inherent in AI training data, algorithms, and user interactions. However, inspired by Joseph Raz's philosophical insight that "neutrality [...] can be a matter of degree" (Raz, 1986), we argue that striving for some neutrality remains essential for promoting balanced AI interactions and mitigating user manipulation. Therefore, we use the term "approximation" of political neutrality to shift the focus from unattainable absolutes to achievable, practical proxies. We propose eight techniques for approximating neutrality across three levels of conceptualizing AI, examining their trade-offs and implementation strategies. In addition, we explore two concrete applications of these approximations to illustrate their practicality. Finally, we assess our framework on current large language models (LLMs) at the output level, providing a demonstration of how it can be evaluated. This work seeks to advance nuanced discussions of political neutrality in AI and promote the development of responsible, aligned language models.