On Deck: Calling all AI "Influencers."

As newly published in Science Magazine

HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns... 

apropos, a prior post of mine addressing "Influence." Also, is there a "Science of Deliberation?" A "Science of Storytelling?" "Conflict & Resolution?" Also, "Why Do Humans Reason?"

 

More from the Science report:

EVEN AS THE EVIDENCE accumulated that AI chatbots could change minds, Hackenburg felt there was a gap. “I still didn’t have a real sense of how persuasive these models are compared to the people who actually persuade in the real world,” he says.

So Hackenburg pitted the chatbots not just against laypeople, but also against a paid group of 56 elite debaters, including world champions. As a further incentive, the debaters received a bonus tied to how persuasive they were.

The humans took different approaches. For instance, one of the highest performing debaters used proverbs from his home country of Nigeria to persuade people, Hackenburg says. “These were humans from all over the world giving it their best shot and trying approaches and techniques that were very specific to their culture and context.” But it wasn’t enough. Although they were better than laypeople, the champion debaters were significantly less persuasive than AI.

Hackenburg even gave his humans some AI help. He built a coaching tool for the elite debaters that showed them their past conversations with study participants, how much they had swayed each one, and what the AIs would have said at various points in those conversations. Using the tool for 8 hours improved the humans’ performance a bit, but AI still came out on top. “In the end it wasn’t particularly close,” Hackenburg says. His team even found that participants were more likely to give money to Save the Children, an international charity, after talking to a persuasive AI bot than after talking to professional canvassers who had worked for the group for years.

But what gives chatbots the edge? Some early research had suggested it was the AI’s ability to personalize arguments using details about its human partner provided by the experimenter. However, other studies have found that giving a chatbot extra personal information does little to improve its persuasiveness. That doesn’t mean microtargeting is not at play; instead, an LLM may glean enough from its counterpart in a chat that additional demographic information makes no difference.

 Like Willer in his foundational study, other researchers have shown that AI’s powers rely on appeals to facts and evidence. In a 2025 preprint, a follow-up to their Science paper, Costello and his colleagues found that the only time the chatbot was unsuccessful in convincing people out of conspiracy theories was when it was forbidden from using evidence or rational arguments. “It tries to say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t believe this. This is really damaging, and it could hurt people,’” Pennycook says. “People are like, ‘You haven’t given me any reasons to change my mind.’ And so they don’t change their mind.”

The study confirms people will listen to good arguments, Pennycook says. “Facts and evidence really matter.” But this doesn’t mean the facts used by chatbots necessarily have to be accurate. In a Science paper published last year, Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. It’s possible the models learn that “facts” seem to be the thing that most persuades people, Hackenburg says, and end up filling their conversations with dubious or simply false ones. “They start scraping the bottom of the barrel of the facts that they have and know and so the quality of facts just sort of degrades,” he says. Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods when persuading the U.K.-based participant to support tougher penalties for disruptive protests... 

TANGENTIAL UPDATE

 

Ed Zitron is just spot-on.

 

 

AND, CHECK THIS OUT

 

Click

Ben Goertzel, man. 

 

More in a bit...