AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans, Including Professional Canvassers And World Championship Debaters

from the what-would-Jane-Austen-say? dept

Persuasion plays a key role in society. Whether it is political or financial decisions, workplace or family choices, or simply reading a book or article (like this one), often someone is trying to persuade someone else to agree with them, possibly by changing their mind. This raises an interesting question: if persuasion is such an important part of life, how good are the latest AI systems in this domain? Are they, for example, better than humans? That is what a research project has just investigated, and on an impressively large scale:

in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters.

The results were unequivocal:

We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI’s advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments.

An arguably more demanding test found that AI systems were not just persuasive when it came to opinions, but also in terms of real-world actions: they managed to elicit substantially more real-money donations to charity than well-paid professional canvassers. The researchers were able to pin down the two key factors that helped AI to out-perform the best human persuaders in all these tests:

We found converging evidence that AI’s advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages.

That is, AI systems were more persuasive largely thanks to the range of knowledge they could demonstrate, and the speed with which they could present it — precisely those aspects of AI that are improving all the time. Which means that frontier AI systems are likely to become even more persuasive in the future. That sounds a rather bleak prospect, but a commentary from Tom Stafford, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, points out that things may not be as bad as they seem:

fact-based persuasion may indeed be effective, but that is good news for human reasonableness, not bad. The way the AI works isn’t some sinister magic; if it produces more facts, it is more persuasive. The constraint that persuasion requires evidence means that what anyone can be persuaded of will ultimately ground out on what can reasonably be claimed about reality. If AI is a tool which produces better-informed citizens and more respect for facts, that can be a positive thing.

That may be true in general, but the original researchers note that there are other factors at play here. For example, access to resources is clearly important:

power could flow to whoever can most readily access and deploy the most capable systems. In practice, that could mean the actors who already command the most resources, such as large private corporations, political campaigns, or nation states. These actors spend heavily to influence public opinion and consumer behaviour, and although the per-message effects of such efforts can be modest, such AI could raise their effectiveness, deepening existing imbalances in who can sway the public.

Another issue is that the persuasive power that comes with the deployment of leading AI systems could increase the clout of top AI companies:

in persuasion contests where both sides can secure access to the most capable systems, such AI could consolidate power by giving significant leverage to the actors that build and control those systems. These actors could tilt the outcome of such contests by, for example, deciding which positions their models will, and will not, argue for. In this case, power would flow not to the users of persuasive AI but to its suppliers, and consolidation of their influence would occur even when access among users is perfectly equal.

More positively, the researchers point out that as constant improvements in technology push down the cost of using persuasive AI

it could help under-resourced actors (e.g., pro se litigants and public defenders, small charities, grassroots activists) compete against more established and better-funded rivals, narrowing long-standing gaps in access to justice and assisting civic advocacy more broadly.

In his blog post, Stafford mentions another factor to consider:

In a world where every surface becomes filled with persuasive text, I don’t think it is inevitable that people will open themselves to being pulled in every direction. Not only do people have a significant degree of native scepticism, tending to resist persuasive efforts as they seek to maintain stability in their existing views, but they also have agency to open themselves, or not, to persuasive effects. The studies reported in this paper asked for an average of 14 minutes of conversation from participants. 14 minutes of sincere engagement might be a lot more than most of us give to alternative points of view in our daily lives.

In other words, we don’t really know yet what impact these highly-persuasive AI systems will have on politics, business, and everyday life. But given their superior ability to convince it seems likely that we will be encountering them more frequently in their role of indefatigable persuader, whether we want that or not.

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Filed Under: ai, canvassing, charities, coaching, donations, facts, grassroots, investment, persuasion, politics, pro se, public defender, tom stafford, university of sheffield