Comment by lhd1
14 hours ago
>persuasion
Is there evidence that such soft skills are improving over time? I take as evidence to the contrary the fact that LLM writing has not substantially improved. I don't see that its powers of persuasion has either, whether that's through making strong arguments for a course of action or writing persuasive essays.
Only the labs knows the truth, but the question as to how many Americans used ChatGPT/Grok/Claude to help them decide how to vote in the most recent election is hopefully going to be something that historians will be able to unearth later.
I wonder if we’re approaching a cultural moment where people in general are doing exactly what they did when Google first became ubiquitous—search to confirm their biases—but now with LLMs instead of Google. But where Google would happily feed them some link to potential mis/disinformation, the AI is more likely to say “no, that’s not accurate, and here’s why…”
I doubt the number is low. Knowing everything I know about llms, I still fall into the same groove as I would if I was talking to a buddy online. That part is not far fetched.
I remember reading about research on using LLM's for political persuasion. It worked well.
There was also research on using LLM's in reddit to persuade, it also worked well.
I went to a talk by an author of one of these papers (David Rand). IIRC the format of the paper's experiment was collecting people with conspiracy theory beliefs and having LLMs with different strategies try to reduce their confidence in the conspiracy theory.
The best strategy, perhaps reassuringly, was tailoring facts to the person's worldview. I don't mean massaging facts, I mean that if the person thinks 9/11 was an inside job because of something about melting steel, then the LLM will present some sourced facts about how that actually works. And then it will do the same thing for all six of the sub-beliefs that support their overall belief. This was key to the strategy: the LLM has enough breadth and recall to exactly and patiently rebut most mistakes a person is making without making them defensive.
This strategy handily beat other things like flattery, selectively lying, etc. So while LLMs can clearly persuade, the evidence suggests it is easiest for them to persuade belief in something that is actually true.
This was in 2024 or 2025. Things might be different now.
I'm a physicist, and I will do my own calculations before I buy some solar/batteries in the near future, but I've been using ChatGPT and Claude to come up with potential candidates and ideas/scenarios. There's approximately 0% chance that they are not advertising what their owners are being paid for.
What’s your reasoning?
Muh shareholder value. Corporations are misaligned superintelligences.