patrick.net

TPB what’s the deal with all AI being so energy spendy? I’m concerned that this will severely raise energy costs nationwide for all of us just so few fellas in big tech can talk to a website.

Can’t they make it energy efficient?

LLMs Sway Political Opinions More Than One-Way Messaging

On December 4, 2025, a pair of studies published in Nature and Science showed dialogues with large language models can shift people’s political attitudes through controlled chatbot experiments.

Model training and prompting made a crucial difference, as chatbots trained on persuasive conversations and instructed to use facts reproduced partisan patterns, producing asymmetric inaccuracies, psychologist Thomas Costello noted.

Researchers found concrete effect sizes, noting that U.S. participants shifted ratings by two to four points, Canada and Poland participants by about 10 points, with effects 36%–42% durable after a month.

The immediate implication is a trade-off between persuasiveness and accuracy, as study authors found about 19% of chatbot claims were predominantly inaccurate and right-leaning bots made more false claims, warning political campaigns may soon deploy such persuasive but less truthful surrogates.

Given the scope and institutions involved, experts now ask how to detect ideologically weighted models after tests with nearly 77,000 UK participants and 19 LLMs by UK AI Security Institute, Oxford, LSE, MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.