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Technology

Your deepest-held beliefs form a pattern than can be predicted by AI

Knowing someone's position on a contentious topic can allow you to predict their views in other areas, thanks to an artificial intelligence that maps patterns between beliefs

By Matthew Sparkes

2 May 2025

Many people have strong beliefs about whether abortion should be legal

Michael Bihmayer/Imago/Alamy

Does God exist? Should we legalise all drugs? Are the Harry Potter books any good? Your position on these thorny questions and more can now be predicted by an artificial intelligence model that was trained on the beliefs of more than 40,000 people – and could potentially be used for mass manipulation.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT already create maps of words and their meanings, to such an extent that calculations can be performed on them: taking the word “king”, subtracting “man” and adding “woman”…

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