The Persuasion Machine: David Rand on How LLMs Can Reshape Political Beliefs
· 58 min
Episode The Persuasion Machine: David Rand on How LLMs Can Reshape Political Beliefs
Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, and Renee DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and contributing editor at Lawfare, spoke with David Rand, professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University.
The conversation covered how inattention to accuracy drives misinformation sharing and the effectiveness of accuracy nudges; how AI chatbots can durably reduce conspiracy beliefs through evidence-based dialogue; research showing that conversational AI can shift voters' candidate preferences, with effect sizes several times larger than traditional political ads; the finding that AI persuasion works through presenting factual claims, but that the claims need not be true to be effective; partisan asymmetries in misinformation sharing; the threat of AI-powered bot swarms on social media; the political stakes of training data and system prompts; and the policy case for transparency requirements.
Additional reading:
• "Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues with AI" - Science (2024) • "Persuading Voters Using Human-Artificial Intelligence Dialogues" - Nature (2025) • "The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational Artificial Intelligence" Science (2025) • "How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy" - Science (2026)
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