Will AI cause mass political polarization? Maybe not

As large language models seep into everyday life, some worry the technology could trigger a mass political realignment. Chatbots, the theory goes, can be shaped by training data and system instructions to privilege certain worldviews, and users who interact with them daily may gradually absorb those biases at scale. But Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan cautions against assuming such a future is inevitable. LLMs may be powerful, he says, but that doesn’t mean they’ll influence people in the ways we expect, or even in the ways their creators intend. There are several reasons an AI -driven political shift may be harder to engineer than it sounds. Most people don’t closely follow political news, and it’s unclear how often they use AI tools for political guidance in the first place. And while chatbots can sound persuasive, and in some cases have encouraged disturbing behavior, there’s little evidence that they are fundamentally reshaping most users’ core beliefs. There’s