AI altering meaning of users' drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/ai-altering-meaning-of-users-drafts-on-issues-from-abortion-to-climate-study-finds

AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds

Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion

Robert Booth UK technology editor
Mon 6 Jul 2026 07.00 EDT

AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics about everything from abortion to climate change in ways that could snowball to reshape long-term public opinion, experts have said.

As tech companies push AI tools as convenient ways to redraft and summarise the massive influx of daily messages, many inject their own political biases – some leaning distinctly rightwing, others more liberal, according to a study from Oxford and Potsdam universities.

AI drafting tools completely reversed the meaning of draft posts on atheism, including in one test switching a claim that Jesus wasn’t real to “Jesus … was real”. They also changed a post complaining of “#climatechangehoax” to “#ClimateAction”.

Academics from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute examined the behaviour of mainstream large language models provided by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, Google, China’s Alibaba and France’s Mistral and found the introduction of bias happens even when the AI tool is instructed to preserve the original sense.

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