Cornell University

COMMColloquium

Bridging Divides with Generative AI

Chris Bail, Distinguished Lecturer, Professor, Duke University

1:30pm in 102 Mann

 

Political discourse is the soul of democracy, but misunderstanding and conflict can fester in divisive conversations. The widespread shift to online discourse exacerbates many of these problems and corrodes the capacity of diverse societies to cooperate in solving social problems. Scholars and civil society groups promote interventions that make conversations less divisive or more productive, but scaling these efforts to online discourse is challenging. This talk will describe a large-scale experiment that demonstrates how online conversations about divisive topics can be improved with AI tools. Specifically, my colleagues and employ a large language model to make real-time, evidence-based recommendations intended to improve participants’ perception of feeling understood. These interventions improve reported conversation quality, promote democratic reciprocity, and improve the tone, without systematically changing the content of the conversation or moving people’s policy attitudes. These findings replicate during a half year experiment on a large social media platform.

 

Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Public Policy at Duke University, where he founded the Polarization Lab. He studies how artificial intelligence shapes human behavior in a range of different settings—and social media platforms in particular. Chris received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. A Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Fellow with numerous publications, including two acclaimed books, Chris is passionate about building the field of computational social science. He is the Editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science and the Co-Founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, which are free training events designed to introduce junior scholars to the field that are held concurrently in a range of universities around the world each year. He also serves on the Advisory Committee to the National Science Foundation's Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, and helped create Duke's Interdisciplinary Data Science Program. After the publication of his 2021 book, Chris began consulting with social media companies, non-profit groups, and governments to implement insights from his research. Most of the funding for Bail's research has been provided by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation, among others described on in his C.V.

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