Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 123 posts

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#11

Post by armchairhacker »

metalcrow wrote: post #3

My guess for the reason behind this is that LLMs have more facts memorized, and thus can make more reasonable and well-researched sounding answers. If you ask an LLM vs a Human "Is a stack in computer science a) a data structure that is first in first out or b) a data structure that is first in last out" the LLM can say stuff resembling "Based on Dijkstra's algorithm proof given in 1943 and the nature of Turing compl…

LLMs also never get tired of arguing. They'll respond to every point from a gish-gallop and provide quality-sounding replies to points that are obviously (to an informed person) flawed or seem (but aren't necessarily) mal-intentioned.

EDIT: LLMs also aren't egocentric; they'll respond in the other person's style (grammar, tone, and perhaps maintain their "subtext" like assumptions), and they're less likely to omit important information that would be implicit to them but not the other person.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#12

Post by reducesuffering »

We're fast approaching the point that any value someone can provide through a digital interface could be better done by a model. What do we use digital interfaces for? Practically everything.

Oh well not being a plumber, electrician, or farmer... but our society's current productivity, technology, automation reduced our need for 80% of the population needing to be farmers to now 1.3% in the US. Can you imagine what the equivalent of 1 billion digital engineers unlocks in understanding and implementing robotics?

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#13

Post by kragen »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #7
kragen wrote: post #5

Which incentivized human persuaders? Are we talking about top salespeople and litigators, or are we talking about average college freshmen? It says they recruited participants from the US through Prolific and paid them £10.12 per hour, so probably more like the latter.

Does it matter? the difference is only 6 months of LLM progress.

It matters if studies like this matter, that is, it matters to people who are interested in what has currently happened rather than what might happen in the future. 6 months of LLM progress keeps not looking like what I expected.

On the other hand, if you're content with your pre-existing predictions about what would happen, which I think is actually a reasonable position, there's no reason to read the paper.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#14

Post by Nevermark »

A clear case where LLMs exceed humans is in identifying solutions to disparate shallow constraints involving what would normally require very wide searches of more knowledge than any of us will ever have.

A simple case I have found, is looking for existing or creating new terms. If I have a series of concepts, which I have names for which have a nice linguistic pattern to emphasize their close relationship, except for one. I can describe the regularly named concepts, then ask for suggestions for the remaining concept.

The LLM pulls from virtually every topic with domain terminology, repurposable languages (Greek, Roman), words from fiction, all the way to creative construction of new words, tenses, etc to come up with great proposals in seconds.

I could imagine that crafting persuasive wording would be a similar challenge. Choosing the right words, right phrasing, etc. to carry as much positive connotation, implication of solidity, avoiding anything sounding challenging or controlling, etc. from all of human language and its huge space of emotional constraints and composites.

Very shallow but very wide reasoning/searching/balancing done in very little time.

And with an ability to avoid giving any unnecessary purchase for disagreement, being informed of all the myriad of typical and idiosyncratic ways people get hung up on failed persuasions. Whether in general or specific topic related.

LLM generated writing can be stereotypical.

But the more constraints put on requested material, the more their ability to construct really very original high quality, or even cleverly unique, prose in real time shines.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#16

Post by koakuma-chan »

metalcrow wrote: post #3

My guess for the reason behind this is that LLMs have more facts memorized, and thus can make more reasonable and well-researched sounding answers. If you ask an LLM vs a Human "Is a stack in computer science a) a data structure that is first in first out or b) a data structure that is first in last out" the LLM can say stuff resembling "Based on Dijkstra's algorithm proof given in 1943 and the nature of Turing compl…

I asked an LLM and it said "A stack is a data structure that follows the Last In, First Out (LIFO) principle. This means that the last element added to the stack is the first element to be removed."

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#17

Post by sidibe »

reducesuffering wrote: post #12

We're fast approaching the point that any value someone can provide through a digital interface could be better done by a model. What do we use digital interfaces for? Practically everything. Oh well not being a plumber, electrician, or farmer... but our society's current productivity, technology, automation reduced our need for 80% of the population needing to be farmers to now 1.3% in the US. Can you imagine what t…

Yes when the knowledge jobs are all done best by AI the rest will follow shortly. we will need to adapt to being "useless" as far as work goes and find other sources of worth. There's still a lot of people who want to compare it to Bitcoin hype around here, IMO the next few years everything is going to change way faster than than it ever has.

For the record I always thought Kurzweil and that crowd was clowns, now I think I was the wrong one

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#18

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #9
Morizero wrote: post #6

Basically the same finding as the controversial Zurich paper on using LLMs to change opinions in the "change my view" subreddit

I'm hoping we see a flood of LLMs just like that Zurich piece, but at 10,000x scale. Perhaps even open source platforms to run your hobby LLM bot farm. Social media has turned into cancer. It'd be riveting to watch it turn into bots talking to other bots. Social media wouldn't go away, but I get the feeling people will engage more with real life again. As the platforms see less growth and fewer real users, we might e…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#19

Post by thethirdone »

Based on the data in table 3, I would attribute most of the difference to length of advice. LLMs average word count (29.4) is more than double human word count (13.25). Most other measures do not have a significant ratio. "Difficult word count" would be the only other with a ratio higher than 2, but that is inherited from total word count.

I think it would be difficult to truly convince me to answer differently in a test with 14 words where 30 would have enough space to actually convey an argument.

I would be very interested to see the test rerun while limiting LLM response length or encouraging long responses from humans.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#20

Post by hansmayer »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #16
metalcrow wrote: post #3

My guess for the reason behind this is that LLMs have more facts memorized, and thus can make more reasonable and well-researched sounding answers. If you ask an LLM vs a Human "Is a stack in computer science a) a data structure that is first in first out or b) a data structure that is first in last out" the LLM can say stuff resembling "Based on Dijkstra's algorithm proof given in 1943 and the nature of Turing compl…

I asked an LLM and it said "A stack is a data structure that follows the Last In, First Out (LIFO) principle. This means that the last element added to the stack is the first element to be removed."

Yikes:( I am so worried about the damage that will be caused by the misuse of these tools. Already a lot of young folks will just mindlessly trust whatever the magic oracle spits out at them. We need to go back to testing people with pen and paper I suppose.
Post reply on HN