By ALI SWENSON and LINLEY SANDERS Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jim Duggan uses ChatGPT almost daily to draft marketing emails for his carbon removal credit business in Huntsville, Alabama. But he’d never trust an artificial intelligence chatbot with any questions about the upcoming presidential election.

“I just don’t think AI produces truth,” the 68-year-old political conservative said in an interview. “Grammar and words, that’s something that’s concrete. Political thought, judgment, opinions aren’t.”

Duggan is part of the majority of Americans who do not trust artificial intelligence-powered chatbots or search results to give them accurate answers, according to a survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say they are not very or not at all confident that these tools provide reliable and factual information, the poll shows.

The findings reveal that even as Americans have started using generative AI-fueled chatbots and search engines in their personal and work lives, most have remained skeptical of these rapidly advancing technologies. That’s particularly true when it comes to information about high-stakes events such as elections.

Earlier this year, a gathering of election officials and AI researchers found that AI tools did poorly when asked relatively basic questions, such as where to find the nearest polling place. Last month, several secretaries of state warned that the AI chatbot developed for the social media platform X was spreading bogus election information, prompting X to tweak the tool so it would first direct users to a federal government website for reliable information.

Large AI models that can generate text, images, videos or audio clips at the click of a button are poorly understood and minimally regulated. Their ability to predict the most plausible next word in a sentence based on vast pools of data allows them to provide sophisticated responses on almost any topic — but it also makes them vulnerable to errors.

Americans are split on whether they think the use of AI will make it more difficult to find accurate information about the 2024 election. About 4 in 10 Americans say the use of AI will make it “much more difficult” or “somewhat more difficult” to find factual information, while another 4 in 10 aren’t sure — saying it won’t make it easier or more challenging, according to the poll. A distinct minority, 16%, say AI will make it easier to find accurate information about the election.

Griffin Ryan, a 21-year-old college student at Tulane University in New Orleans, said he doesn’t know anyone on his campus who uses AI chatbots to find information about candidates or voting. He doesn’t use them either, since he’s noticed that it’s possible to “basically just bully AI tools into giving you the answers that you want.”

The Democrat from Texas said he gets most of his news from mainstream outlets such as CNN, the BBC, NPR, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. When it comes to misinformation in the upcoming election, he’s more worried that AI-generated deepfakes and AI-fueled bot accounts on social media will sway voter opinions.

“I’ve seen videos of people doing AI deepfakes of politicians and stuff, and these have all been obvious jokes,” Ryan said. “But it does worry me when I see those that maybe someone’s going to make something serious and actually disseminate it.”

A relatively small portion of Americans — 8% — think results produced by AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude are always or often based on factual information, according to the poll. They have a similar level of trust in AI-assisted search engines such as Bing or Google, with 12% believing their results are always or often based on facts.

There already have been attempts to influence U.S. voter opinions through AI deepfakes, including AI-generated robocalls that imitated President Joe Biden’s voice to convince voters in New Hampshire’s January primary to stay home from the polls.

More commonly, AI tools have been used to create fake images of prominent candidates that aim to reinforce particular negative narratives — from Vice President Kamala Harris in a communist uniform to former President Donald Trump in handcuffs.

Ryan, the Tulane student, said his family is fairly media literate, but he has some older relatives who heeded false information about COVID-19 vaccines on Facebook during the pandemic. He said that makes him concerned that they might be susceptible to false or misleading information during the election cycle.

Bevellie Harris, a 71-year-old Democrat from Bakersfield, California, said she prefers getting election information from official government sources, such as the voter pamphlet she receives in the mail ahead of every election.

“I believe it to be more informative,” she said, adding that she also likes to look up candidate ads to hear their positions in their own words.

The poll of 1,019 adults was conducted July 29-Aug. 8, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

Swenson reported from New York.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Karen Kaplan | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

These days, there’s no surer way to start a fight than to talk politics with someone who disagrees with you. And with election day drawing near, political conversations are increasingly difficult to avoid.

You could muddle your way through the next two months and hope for the best. Or you could take Tania Israel‘s advice and embrace the opportunity to help bridge America’s political divide.

Israel, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, has been facilitating difficult conversations since the 1990s, when she brought together people on opposite sides of the abortion debate.

“It was a transformational experience for me,” Israel recalled. “It didn’t change anything about how I felt about reproductive rights, but it changed so much about how I felt about people who disagreed with me.”

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, she stepped up her efforts to connect with people outside her bubble and wrote a book to guide others willing to do the same. “Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation,” inspires readers to listen to their fellow Americans rather than debate them.

Israel spoke to The Times about how individual conversations can help the country heal. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why does it seem like there’s more political conflict than there used to be?

People are struggling not just with arguments with their uncle, but arguments with their phone, with the news, and in their own heads. All of that makes us very emotionally activated, which is part of the reason stress-related political conflict is on the rise and keeps going up.

It’s not healthy for us, it’s also not healthy for our relationships, and it’s not healthy for our democracy.

Is it good to try to bridge the divide, or is it better for your mental health to steer clear?

I think what’s best for people is to build the capacity to be able to do both — to be able to have those conversations, and also to be able to know when it’s best not to.

What motivates people to engage with someone from the other side?

Some people say, “I want to maintain a relationship with somebody in my life and we’re having trouble doing that because of political conflict.”

Some people say they want to persuade or convince someone else.

Some people say they want to find common ground or heal the divide.

And then some people say, “I simply cannot fathom how people can think or act or vote like they do,” and they’re looking for some insight.

Are we so used to being on our phones and that makes it hard to deal with people in real life?

It’s much easier to have stereotypes of people when we’re engaging with them only as social media accounts. It distorts our understanding of who other people are.

Are stereotypes the only problem?

As humans, we have these cognitive biases where we see ourselves as being very rational, basing our ideas on solid information. But we see people on the other side as being irrational, illogical, and being brainwashed by misinformation. Both sides are seeing things this way.

My favorite cognitive bias is called motive attribution asymmetry, where we see ourselves as being motivated by protective, caring motives, and we see the other side as being driven by selfishness and by hostility.

How can we correct our cognitive biases?

Recognizing them is probably the most important thing.

We can recognize the other side’s biases. If we just recognize that we are susceptible to all of those same things, that can help us to have that curiosity to correct them.

If you find yourself in the middle of a polarizing argument, how can you turn things around?

The best thing we can do if we’re trying to find common ground, persuade somebody, or gain insight is to try to understand them better.

The way we do that is we listen. We encourage people to elaborate. We manage our own emotions. And when we do share with people, we share stories instead of statistics and slogans.

That’s not what people think they’re supposed to be doing. They think they’re supposed to be having a debate, where they’re bringing in all the information and the stats and the rationale.

Why are stories better than statistics?

When we’re using stats and arguments, we’re drawing those from our trusted sources, which are very often not the same as the trusted sources of the person that we’re talking to.

Confirmation bias causes us to accept information that supports what we already believe to be true, and ignore or dismiss information that conflicts with our beliefs. So when we’re telling people things that are in conflict with what they believe, they are more likely to dismiss what we’re saying — and frankly, to dismiss us as a trusted source.

When we embed information in stories, people remember it better and they accept it more. It’s also how humans relate to each other. Not only is it more effective, it’s a more interesting conversation.

Scientists will say an anecdote is not data. But you’re saying an anecdote is better than data.

Right. We can have all of the information, but when we’ve got another human being involved, it turns out that just telling them all the information doesn’t help.

If we believe in science, we also need to believe in the science that says that’s not the way you get someone to change their behavior.

Why would someone who doesn’t trust your facts trust your story?

Stories feel more true. And you can’t argue with stories, you know? “Here’s my story of my life.” You can’t argue with my story of my life. Also, if there’s some emotion in the story, people connect with that.

We often put our ideas out there to say, “Here are my ideas. This is why you should believe it.” Or to say, “Here are my ideas. This is why this justifies what I think or do.” We very rarely put our ideas out there to say, “Here are my ideas. Here are the limits of my understanding of this. What am I missing?”

That is a completely disarming approach because it brings intellectual humility into it. We can have very strong beliefs but still have curiosity about and respect for views that might be different from our own. That’s going to help to broaden our understanding.

It seems like you’d have to be in the right mindset to want to talk with someone you’re used to disagreeing with, no?

We have to work up the capacity to do this. There are habits we need to form and habits we need to reform. All of that training is going to help us be able to face political division, as well as other challenges in our lives.

What’s involved with that training?

The first step is to reduce polarizing input. We can consume news more wisely, use social media more intentionally and correct our cognitive biases. That’s going to help us be in a space of equilibrium.

Next is building our individual capacity through emotional resilience. That’s being able to face a person or a lawn sign and not completely melt down.

Intellectual humility helps us broaden our minds, and you’re absolutely right that you have to want to do that. It’s about having the curiosity to recognize that you might not have the full story and that there’s something more you can learn.

And then there’s compassion. You’ve got to take all these steps before you can even get to building empathy and compassion.

Once you’ve done all of that, now you’re ready to strengthen connections.

How?

If you want to engage across the divide, you want to do so effectively — listening to others, telling stories, all of that.

It’s also engaging with our communities and our country. Civic engagement is a really important activity. Do something meaningful to support the causes that you care about. Volunteering not only benefits us as society, it also benefits our mental health.

Posting something on social media is not a very effective form of advocacy. Turning away from our screens and engaging with other three-dimensional human beings is probably the best thing we can do for any of these issues.

There’s also this thing most people have never heard of, which is the bridging movement.

What’s that?

There are over 500 organizations that are working on bridging divides and strengthening our democracy. If people join that movement, it’s great. But just knowing that that’s happening can make people more optimistic about their fellow Americans, and about the future of our country.

___

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By LINLEY SANDERS and AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Young women are more liberal than they have been in decades, according to a Gallup analysis of more than 20 years of polling data.

Over the past few years, about 4 in 10 young women between the ages of 18 and 29 have described their political views as liberal, compared with two decades ago when about 3 in 10 identified that way.

For many young women, their liberal identity is not just a new label. The share of young women who hold liberal views on the environment, abortion, race relations and gun laws has also jumped by double digits, Gallup found.

Young women “aren’t just identifying as liberal because they like the term or they’re more comfortable with the term, or someone they respect uses the term,” said Lydia Saad, the director of U.S. social research at Gallup. “They have actually become much more liberal in their actual viewpoints.”

Becoming a more cohesive political group with distinctly liberal views could turn young women into a potent political force, according to Saad. While it is hard to pinpoint what is making young women more liberal, they now are overwhelmingly aligned on many issues, which could make it easier for campaigns to motivate them.

Young women are already a constituency that has leaned Democratic — AP VoteCast data shows that 65% of female voters under 30 voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 — but they are sometimes less reliable when it comes to turnout.

Young women began to diverge ideologically from other groups, including men between 18 and 29, women over 30 and men over 30, during Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency. That trend appears to have accelerated more recently, around the election of Republican Donald Trump, the #MeToo movement and increasingly successful efforts by the anti-abortion movement to erode abortion access. At the same time, more women, mostly Democrats, were elected to Congress, as governor and to state legislatures, giving young women new representation and role models in politics.

The change in young women’s political identification is happening across the board, Gallup found, rather than being propelled by a specific subgroup.

Taylor Swift’s endorsement Tuesday of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, after her debate against Trump, illustrated one of the issues where young women have moved to the left. In Swift’s Instagram announcing the endorsement praised Harris and running mate Tim Walz for championing reproductive rights.

Signs for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are posted in Jarvis Square ahead of the presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

The Gallup analysis found that since the Obama era, young women have become nearly 20 percentage points more likely to support broad abortion rights. There was a roughly similar increase in the share of young women who said protection of the environment should be prioritized over economic growth and in the share of young women who say gun laws should be stricter.

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Now, Saad said, solid majorities of young women hold liberal views on issues such as abortion, the environment, and gun laws.

Young women are “very unified on these issues … and not only do they hold these views, but they are dissatisfied with the country in these areas, and they are worried about them,” she said. That, she added, could help drive turnout.

“You’ve got supermajorities of women holding these views,” she said, and they are “primed to be activated to vote on these issues.”

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in London contributed to this report.