Can Generative AI Promote Democracy? Toward an Adaptive Storytelling Platform for Civic Education

• In Event: Use of AI in Various Contexts

Abstract

We designed and tested a novel digital civic storytelling intervention to promote democratic changes in students’ political attitudes, leveraging subtle modifications in story language to influence students’ emotional engagement. In our pre-registered experiment, college students (N=321) listened to five AI-generated political stories, with a randomly assigned treatment group receiving stories with more emotive wording than students in the control group. Using weighted difference-in-differences regressions, students in the treatment group reported a greater reduction in four measures of political polarization from pretest to posttest, and the reduction was moderated by students’ emotional engagement in the story. Our study demonstrated that AI-driven adaptive storytelling may be an effective civic education tool that can counteract rising anti-democratic sentiment among youth.

Authors

• Christopher Wegemer, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jeff Burke, University of California - Los Angeles