The Hidden Costs of AI-Mediated Political Outreach: Persuasion and AI Penalties in the US and UK

TL;DR

This study empirically examines how people evaluate AI-mediated political outreach, revealing a persuasion penalty and an AI penalty that impact perceptions of legitimacy and trust in democratic contexts.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical evidence on public evaluations of AI-mediated political outreach and identifies distinct penalties affecting legitimacy and trust.

Findings

Explicitly persuasive outreach is less acceptable and more threatening.

AI-mediated outreach triggers normative concerns about communicative agents.

Both penalties are consistent across the US and UK.

Abstract

As AI-enabled systems become available for political campaign outreach, an important question has received little empirical attention: how do people evaluate the communicative practices these systems represent, and what consequences do those evaluations carry? Most research on AI-enabled persuasion examines attitude change under enforced exposure, leaving aside whether people regard AI-mediated outreach as legitimate or not. We address this gap with a preregistered 2x2 experiment conducted in the United States and United Kingdom (N = 1,800 per country) varying outreach intent (informational vs.~persuasive) and type of interaction partner (human vs.~AI-mediated) in the context of political issues that respondents consider highly important. We find consistent evidence for two evaluation penalties. A persuasion penalty emerges across nearly all outcomes in both countries: explicitly persuasive outreach is evaluated as less acceptable, more threatening to personal autonomy, less beneficial, and more damaging to organizational trust than informational outreach, consistent with reactance to perceived threats to attitudinal freedom. An AI penalty is consistent with a distinct mechanism: AI-mediated outreach triggers normative concerns about appropriate communicative agents, producing similarly negative evaluations across five outcomes in both countries. As automated outreach becomes more widespread, how people judge it may matter for democratic communication just as much as whether it changes minds.