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LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

arxiv.org

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Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#111

Post by Matthyze »

abtinf wrote: post #47
koakuma-chan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It’s subtle but I would regard this as an incorrect answer. The structure of the LLM answer is: A is B; B exhibits property C. The correct answer is: A exhibits property C; B is the class of things with property C; therefore A is B. There is a crucial difference between these two.

I think you've read too much early Wittgenstein. That is simply not how people communicate.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#112

Post by Aeyxen »

It's always amusing to watch people act shocked when LLMs beat average humans at persuasion. The actual headline here should be: 'A system trained on terabytes of successful human persuasion is better at persuasion than a random person on a crowdwork platform.' No mystery—just the mechanics of scale and exposure.

But guess what? Now, finally, we can co-opt LLMs for things humans fumble: e.g., real-time conversational tutoring, adaptive negotiation agents, or even scalable personal 'bullshit detectors' as countermeasures. I hope conversation doesn't go into AI-Safeteyism and restricting LLMs and more about building stuff. Let's build, not block.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#113

Post by amenhotep »

beeflet wrote: post #86
upghost wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a consequence of the fact that any argument not responded to "flows across" the score sheet and is automatically a win for the team making the argument, no matter how silly. So a "natural" tendency would be to ignore ridiculous arguments like "not paying for school lunches will cause children to hyperventilate, and by the butterfly effect will lead to infinite hurricanes in developing nations causing a collap…

Which is pretty ridiculous. The purpose of a debate should be to change/consolidate the hearts and minds of the audience to your side. To this end, it's usually sufficient to pick apart a few of the key points of your opponent's argument. Nitpicking every aspect of your opponent usually comes off as uncharismatic. Brevity is really important in a debate. Especially in the modern day where someone might turn you into…

He looks awful in a suit!

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#114

Post by sebastiennight »

Aeyxen wrote: post #112

It's always amusing to watch people act shocked when LLMs beat average humans at persuasion. The actual headline here should be: 'A system trained on terabytes of successful human persuasion is better at persuasion than a random person on a crowdwork platform.' No mystery—just the mechanics of scale and exposure. But guess what? Now, finally, we can co-opt LLMs for things humans fumble: e.g., real-time conversational…

As a marketer with a couple of decades of experience I can tell you that there is way more financial incentive in "slightly persuading [consumer] to tilt towards [product] in their next purchase, and spend more and earlier" than there ever will be towards "next-level unbiased tutor in anything".

The "super tutor" stuff that is always mentioned as the utopian outcome (along with "cures for cancer") is, unsurprisingly, never something being worked on by the person or lab quoting these examples.

I guess anything goes in B2B settings, but there is a valid reason to be cautious about these advances when it comes to mass-market consumer-facing applications.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#115

Post by energy123 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #88
CJefferson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on reading bad AI generated student essays it’s worse than that, LLMs are happy to “fill in the blanks” with whatever made up fact would make their argument look best. Most people can’t lie that smoothly, and most readers don’t check carefully, unless they are already an expert in the area. Any kind of maths proof is particularly bad, they will look convincing and clear until you read them very carefully and se…

It depends on the AI. ChatGPT's higher models (o1-pro/o3/o4-mini-high) have some kind of limited capability to detect errors in the user's thinking, and have relatively few hallucinations.

o3 have twice the hallucinations of o1 according to their own hallucination benchmark

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#116

Post by Aeyxen »

sebastiennight wrote: post #114
Aeyxen wrote: post #112

It's always amusing to watch people act shocked when LLMs beat average humans at persuasion. The actual headline here should be: 'A system trained on terabytes of successful human persuasion is better at persuasion than a random person on a crowdwork platform.' No mystery—just the mechanics of scale and exposure. But guess what? Now, finally, we can co-opt LLMs for things humans fumble: e.g., real-time conversational…

As a marketer with a couple of decades of experience I can tell you that there is way more financial incentive in "slightly persuading [consumer] to tilt towards [product] in their next purchase, and spend more and earlier" than there ever will be towards "next-level unbiased tutor in anything". The "super tutor" stuff that is always mentioned as the utopian outcome (along with "cures for cancer") is, unsurprisingly,…

I understand your perspective as a marketer, but I think you're creating a false dichotomy. Yes, persuasion tech has stronger financial incentives, but that doesn't prevent beneficial applications from emerging simultaneously.

The "super tutor" isn't some distant fantasy - millions already use ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools daily for personalized learning. They're imperfect but genuinely helpful for programming, languages, math, and countless other topics.

Look at what happened with YouTube: millions of people transformed themselves into programmers, musicians, mechanics, and countless other professions through free video tutorials. Khan Academy revolutionized math education. Coursera and edX brought university courses to anyone with internet. This wasn't utopian thinking - it was practical technology solving real educational problems at scale.

What's different now is that LLMs enable the missing piece: personalization. The one-on-one adaptive experience that was previously limited to those who could afford human tutors at $50-100/hour is now available to anyone at negligible marginal cost.

Your skepticism about cancer applications too ignores the technological trajectory we've been on for decades. Just as YouTube and online platforms democratized education, technology has been steadily dismantling bottlenecks in medical research.

The human genome project initially cost $3 billion and took 13 years. Today you can sequence a genome for under $1,000 in days. This wasn't utopian thinking; it was technological progress following its natural course.

Think what LLMs will do here.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#117

Post by smeej »

Llamamoe wrote: post #104
smeej wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you mention this, because my father operates exactly as you describe the LLMs, making facts up on the spot, lying smoothly and keeping track of the lies... ...and he's built his whole career in sales because of it. He despises the existence of Google, because the last thing a pathological bullshitter wants is fact-checking in pockets! It's taken me nearly 40 years to understand that anchoring statements in…

I feel like a good half of humanity operates this way, with it being far more prevalent in boomers than younger generations. It doesn't matter what is backed by evidence to them, instead they rely on anecdotes and persuasive quips and factoids. Having a friend who claims to have experienced X and listing off several other anecdotes means more to them than any amount of evidence.

The truly scary thing to me is watching them start to believe the anecdotes they've stolen from people and presented as their own stories actually did happen to them, as they lose their marbles.

I've spent much of my life learning to tell when people are making things up, but telling when they genuinely believe something that's completely wrong is a very different skill.

It's especially frustrating when they change the narrative of a real story about something where there were multiple witnesses (e.g., my mom and my siblings), then come to believe the narrative, and then accuse us of conspiring to gaslight them.

On the one hand, I get why that would be disorienting and scary, to have a whole group of people telling you you're wrong about something you're sure you remember. On the other hand...karma?

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#118

Post by xrhobo »

jimbokun wrote: post #92
justonceokay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is very short but conveys the idea well. Not all debate is like this but it is definitely a real phenomenon https://youtu.be/LMO27PAHjrY

What the fuck is wrong with the people running these debates that they reward these techniques?

It is quite strange. One would think a judge would easily throw this out.

I mean there is probably not a specific rule I could point to that a high school athlete couldn't ride a bike or a motorcycle in a 400m track run either.

There is probably not a specific rule that you can't shoot the shot put out of a canon either.

I would just assume the judges have the slightest bit of common sense.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#119

Post by rstuart4133 »

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…

> My guess for the reason behind this is that LLMs have more facts memorized,

From https://ai.meta.com/research/cicero/ :

    When playing 40 games against human players, CICERO achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game
There are not a lot of facts to know when playing diplomacy. It's all about manipulating the other guy with words.
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