How AI can improve online political conversations

What is it about?

Discussion and dialogue are crucial to democracy, but misunderstanding and conflict can fester in divisive conversations. An increasing shift to online conversations may also exacerbate these problems. There are groups working to make political conversations less divisive or more productive, but applying these efforts online and in a way that reaches many people can be daunting and prohibitively expensive. How might new artificial intelligence tools help? To illustrate one way, we conducted a large-scale experiment in which we paired gun control supporters and opponents in conversations and used AI tools similar to chatGPT (called language models) to make real-time, evidence-based recommendations intended to improve democratic reciprocity. We conceive of democratic reciprocity as a willingness to grant political opponents the same right to express and advocate their views in the public sphere that we hope they will grant us. One person in these discussions was randomly assigned to get suggestions from an AI tool, which they could accept or reject (see the figure below). The presence of this AI assistance led to better perceptions of the discussion and an increased willingness to grant democratic reciprocity to one’s political opponents. Importantly, the AI assistance did not change the content of the discussions or manipulate participants into a particular view of gun regulation, allowing for human control in multiple steps.

Featured Image

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Divisive online political conversations are a tremendous problem, leading to a host of negative individual and social consequences. We provide evidence that, when carefully deployed, AI tools can address these problems efficiently and at scale. Though many are rightly worried about the prospect of artificial intelligence spreading misinformation or polarizing online communications, our findings indicate it may also be useful for promoting respect, understanding, and democratic reciprocity. We encourage research into the ways that advances in technological tools can address (rather than just exacerbate) political conflicts and crises across the globe.