Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements The news: Chatting with a politically biased AI model is more effective than political ads at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party, new research shows. The catch: The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things. The findings are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections. Read the full story . —Michelle Kim The era of AI persuasion in elections is about to begin —Tal Feldman is a JD candidate at Yale Law School who focuses on technology and national security. Aneesh Pappu is a PhD student and Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford University who focuses on agentic AI and technology policy. The fear that elections could be overwhelmed by AI-generated realistic fake media has gone mainstream—and for good reason. But that’s only half the story. The deeper threat isn’t that AI can just imitate people—it’s that it can actively persuade people. And new research published this week shows just how powerful that persuasion can be. AI chatbots can shift voters’ views by a substantial margin, far more than traditional political advertising tends to do. In the coming years, we will see the rise of AI that can personalize arguments, test what works, and quietly reshape political views at scale. That shift—from imitation to active persuasion—should worry us deeply. Read the full story. The ads that sell the sizzle of genetic trait discrimination —Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests to influence their baby’s traits, including eye color, hair color, and IQ. Inside the station, every surface was wrapped with more of its ads—babies on turnstiles, on staircases, on banners overhead. “Think about it. Makeup and then genetic optimization,” exulted Kian Sadeghi, the 26-year-old founder of Nucleus Genomics, the startup running the ads. The day after the campaign launched, Sadeghi and I had briefly sparred online. He’d been on X showing off a phone app where parents can click through traits like eye color and hair color. I snapped back that all this sounded a lot like Uber Eats—another crappy, frictionless future invented by entrepreneurs, but this time you’d click for a baby. That night, I agreed to m
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review