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Researchers find what makes AI chatbots politically persuasive

✇Ars Technica
By: Jacek Krywko
4 December 2025 at 15:07

Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections.

To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the largest study on AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 participants in the UK. It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI.

AI dystopias

The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.

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Many genes associated with dog behavior influence human personalities, too

✇Ars Technica
By: John Timmer
26 November 2025 at 07:30

Many dog breeds are noted for their personalities and behavioral traits, from the distinctive vocalizations of huskies to the herding of border collies. People have worked to identify the genes associated with many of these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that dogs can interbreed. But that creates its own experimental challenges, as it can be difficult to separate some behaviors from physical traits distinctive to the breed—small dog breeds may seem more aggressive simply because they feel threatened more often.

To get around that, a team of researchers recently did the largest gene/behavior association study within a single dog breed. Taking advantage of a population of over 1,000 golden retrievers, they found a number of genes associated with behaviors within that breed. A high percentage of these genes turned out to correspond to regions of the human genome that have been associated with behavioral differences as well. But, in many cases, these associations have been with very different behaviors.

Gone to the dogs

The work, done by a team based largely at Cambridge University, utilized the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which involved over 3,000 owners of these dogs filling out annual surveys that included information on their dogs’ behavior. Over 1,000 of those owners also had blood samples obtained from their dogs and shipped in; the researchers used these samples to scan the dogs’ genomes for variants. Those were then compared to ratings of the dogs’ behavior on a range of issues, like fear or aggression directed toward strangers or other dogs.

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The evolution of rationality: How chimps process conflicting evidence

✇Ars Technica
By: Jacek Krywko
16 November 2025 at 07:00

When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that evidence. “You know—ask ourselves if we should really believe that based on the evidence we’ve got,” says Jan M. Engelmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Engelmann says that from the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, people thought that only humans are rational. So, he designed a study to see if rationality shows up in chimpanzees. It turned out that they’re almost as rational as we are.

Food puzzles

“There was quite a bit of research showing that chimpanzees can form their beliefs in response to evidence,” Engelmann says. The experiments usually involved chimpanzees deciding which of the two boxes contained a snack. When the researchers shook both boxes and there was a rattling sound coming from one of them, the chimps almost always chose the box where the rattling came from.

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