Ready for Chatbot Canvassers?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The good news is voters are more persuaded by factual claims than emotional appeals or appeals to fear. But the bad news is that A.I. chatbots, trying to convince you, will keep making factual claims long after it runs out of actual facts.
Guest: David Rand, professor of information science, marketing and psychology at Cornell University
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, it's Lizzie. One of the things I try to do on this show is to take something |
| 0:07.5 | that fascinates me, whether it's something confusing or outrageous or something that needs |
| 0:12.8 | a heavy dose of skepticism, and go deeper to unravel the why behind the news. Why a handful of tech dudes have so much influence in our lives? |
| 0:24.4 | Why most of the money for AI seems to be going in a big circle. |
| 0:29.5 | Why Elon Musk cheats at video games. |
| 0:32.6 | To make this show, we need you. |
| 0:35.6 | I'm going to be really frank with you. |
| 0:37.1 | This is a tough time to do journalism. |
| 0:39.6 | I have been in this business for 25 years, |
| 0:42.3 | and I don't know that it has ever been this hard. |
| 0:46.1 | The ad market is bumpy. |
| 0:48.1 | Every day is filled with constant chaotic news |
| 0:51.7 | and people who want to undermine independent journalism. |
| 0:55.6 | So, I am asking you to support our show. |
| 0:58.6 | You can do that by joining Slate Plus, because right now, till the end of the year, |
| 1:03.7 | we are running a big ol' special, half off the annual cost of a Slate Plus membership. |
| 1:09.4 | You get fun extra episodes of this show, |
| 1:11.9 | access to all the stuff on the Slate site, no paywall, |
| 1:15.0 | and member-only events, |
| 1:17.2 | like the one my producers and I did about our meme coin, |
| 1:20.2 | a completely ridiculous exercise that somehow briefly was worth $2 million. |
| 1:25.9 | All you got to do is go to slate.com slash TBD Plus and enter the code TBD50. |
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