“AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses.”
Nearly 19,000 conversations, and the machines beat championship debaters and paid canvassers. The mechanism is boring. The bots just dump more facts faster than a person can. Every political operation on the planet now has a cheap tool that outperforms its best human staff at changing minds, and nobody regulates any of it.