AI systems out-persuade expert humans
2026/06/15 by Kobi Hackenburg, Caroline Wagner, Luke Hewitt +5 · 15 voices · 1 citation
#cs.CY #cs.AI
paper · pdf
Abstract
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, 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. 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. 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. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.
Citations
Cited by
Discussions
- LLMs will likely be the most powerful propaganda tool that has ever existed arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475 [bsky, 136 points, 6 comments]
- Interesting pre-print on persuasive capabilities of LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475 [bsky, 18 points, 3 comments]
- AI beat elite debaters in head-to-head text-chat persuasion experiments. AI won because it typed faster, said more, and did not run out of content ammunition. arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475 [bsky, 15 points, 1 comments]
- AI systems out-persuade expert humans [hn, 4 points, 2 comments]
- AI systems out-persuade expert humans [hn, 4 points, 0 comments]
- arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475 I wonder whether automatic multi-side AI persuasion lets people converge on views that are true to their values and reality or just confuses them. [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]
- AI systems out-persuade expert humans [hn, 3 points, 2 comments]
- New massive persuasion experiment from AISI. [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
- AI out-persuades world-champion debaters, Oxford study finds [lemmy, 1 points, 0 comments]
- AI systems out-persuade expert humans arxiv.org/pdf/2606.16475 [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
- “AI systems out-persuade expert humans” arxiv.org/pdf/2606.16475 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- A preprint finding conversational AI substantially out-persuades skilled human advocates in contested real-world decision scenarios. Submit to upvote on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=ht [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- AI systems out-persuade expert humans [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- A study reveals AI systems outshine expert persuaders in areas like fundraising and debate, showcasing their edge in quickly delivering information. This research underscores AI's potential impact on [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- #toread #paper AI systems out-persuade expert humans by Kobi Hackenburg et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475v1 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
Related