Can the country’s elected leaders recognize when they are talking to a machine? In 2020, researchers at Cornell University wanted to find out. They sent 32,398 emails, generated by so-called artificial intelligence, to America’s 7,132 state legislators and waited for replies.
And they came. Legislators responded to emails written by a digital “large language model” just 2% less often than they did emails written by human undergraduates — a statistically significant difference, but a small one.
What’s more, the study noted, “a sizable number of AI-written correspondences elicited lengthy and personal responses suggesting that legislators believed that they were responding to constituents.”
The study, which was published online in February, captured the true promise of artificial intelligence that can “learn” from billions of human-created words and phrases, and then synthesize and create information on its own. But it also revealed one potential danger: massive…
