Reacción a "Conversations with AI chatbots can significantly influence the direction of the vote"

Both studies are very robust and, moreover, agree in their main conclusions, although, of course, they are not without limitations. The study by Lin et al. has a pre-registered design, involved citizens from several countries (USA, Canada, and Poland), and offers a rigorous analysis that reinforces the plausibility of its results. Meanwhile, the study by Hackenburg et al. stands out for its scale, both in the number of participants (almost 77,000) and conversations (91,000), as well as the linguistic models involved (both open and commercial weights), which allowed for a systematic evaluation of the various technical aspects behind the persuasive capacity of chatbots. In both cases, despite the artificiality of the experimental environments, these are exhaustive, transparent, and very interesting studies.

Both articles concur with the available evidence highlighting the power of dialogue and reasoning based on facts and evidence as the primary means of persuasion, but they also offer interesting new insights. For example, although most of the available literature states that persuasive messages should be personalized according to the audience's values, researchers have not found that such personalization offers significant benefits. They show how conversations with chatbots generate persuasive effects superior to those observed with traditional political messages, and, moreover, the main mechanism of persuasion is not psychological strategies, but rather the presentation of a high density of factual and verifiable information.

However, there is an important trade-off: when the chatbot is asked to be more persuasive, there is a risk that the amount of inaccurate information it offers will be greater. Interestingly, the articles also show a systematic asymmetry in the factual accuracy of the information generated by chatbots: when they have to persuade people to vote for right-wing candidates, they offer more inaccurate information than when they have to persuade people to vote for left-wing candidates.

The main implication is that the scenario they describe has ceased to be hypothetical and has become possible (and worrying): using chatbots to persuade citizens to vote a certain way through a dialogue supposedly based on facts, but which, in light of its results, may sacrifice factual accuracy in order to increase persuasive power. However, it's important to note that neither article claims that inaccurate information is more persuasive, only that as persuasive power increases, the amount of inaccurate information tends to increase.

[Regarding possible limitations] Both articles describe experimental situations with characteristics that may lead to different results in real-world contexts and campaigns. Thus, in the work by Lin et al., we must consider that:

1. Participants enrolled voluntarily (self-selection bias).
2. A controlled dialogue (where the human knows they are participating in an experiment involving a chatbot) is not the same as a campaign situation.
3. Real-world behavior, such as voting, was not measured.
4. The effects in the US were less pronounced than those observed in other countries.
5. The fact that chatbot persuasion can lead to the dissemination of inaccurate information opens the door to a series of significant risks (and ethical dilemmas) that require further attention.

Regarding Hackenburg et al., this study also has limitations:

1. It was conducted only in the UK and, consequently, cannot be directly generalized to any other country.
2. The participants were paid, which further distances the experimental conditions from real-world scenarios.
3. The requirement for informed consent and a prior briefing also distances the experimental conditions from those of a real campaign.
4. Again, the problem of the imbalance between persuasion and truthfulness remains unsatisfactorily resolved.