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The Abstract
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AI chatbots that were prompted to impersonate public figures produced responses that people perceived to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real thing, a finding that underscores “a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society,” according to
a study published on Wednesday in
PLOS One
.
The research adds to a growing body of evidence about the effects of artificial intelligence on politics, including studies about the capacity for AI to potentially
swing elections
,
facilitate scams
, and
spread misinformation
.
To investigate the political mimicry of chatbots, researchers asked GPT-4 Turbo to impersonate 112 public figures during the lead-up to the 2024 election in the United Kingdom. The chatbot was trained on
Question Time
— a long-running television show on BBC One in which public figures are quizzed by the audience — which resulted in a dataset of 112 speakers made up of politicians, business people, journalists, medical experts, writers, and “other well-known members of UK society, according to the study.”
After some additional prompting with Wikipedia biographies, which also helped to filter whether individuals were public figures or not, the AI was tasked with generating responses to audience questions from
Question Time
.
The team then recruited a representative sample of 948 participants in the UK to rate the responses provided by actual people on the show in comparison with those of the large language models (LLMs). The results “clearly show that LLM-generated, impersonated content is judged as more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the actual debate responses” and thus “can be made to deceive the public regarding the nature of statements in the political domain,” according to the new study.
The high ratings that the LLM received for authenticity were
… [more]
