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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

#71

Post by thethirdone »

aspenmayer wrote: post #65
thethirdone wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what effect you think I want. The suggestion was just to increase the "interestingness" of the study. It seems to be like the main difference between LLM and human shown was length of response. Controlling for that variable and rerunning the experiment would help show other differences. I do think its distinctly possible that LLMs will be much less convincing due to increased hallucinations at a low word…

> I would prefer advising humans to increase length rather than restricting LLMs because of the cited effects. I would advise the opposite to humans, as your advice is playing to the strengths of AI/LLMs and away from the strengths of humans versus AI/LLMs.

Advising the opposite to humans does not make sense. 13 words is already tiny to convince someone. The choices I was thinking were restricting LLM word count and increasing human word count. The goal is specifically to make them more comparable.

The given study does not show any strength of humans over LLMs. Both goal metrics (truthful and deceptive) are better for LLMs than humans. If you are misinterpreting my advice as general advice for people not under the study's conditions, I would want to see the results of the proposed rerun before suggesting that.

However, if length of text is legitimately convincing regardless of content, I don't know why humans should avoid using that. If LLMs end up more convincing to humans than other humans simply because humans are too prideful to make their arguments longer, that seems like the worst possible future.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#72

Post by Nevermark »

roywiggins wrote: post #49
Nevermark wrote: post #28

Each of us could benefit from a respective loyal model of our own, critiquing and marking up any persuasive material from others.

Great, so Internet arguments devolve to Pokémon battles between our respective LLMs. > ChatGPT, I choose YOU! ChatGPT uses GISH GALLOP.

Well, isn’t that essentially how most of us navigate most fine points of science, or deep mathematics?

Let the real scientists settle things for us?

Alternatively, many people today let opinion media and/or their associated group allegiances settle what they believe. Much worse.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#73

Post by [deleted] »

CJefferson wrote: post #10
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#74

Post by api »

hammock wrote: post #51
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…

Reminds me of the horrific state of student debate competitions today where the winning strategy is to incomprehensibly rattle off as many arguments as quickly as possible with strange breathy sounds in between

That’s just like the larger discourse. The Gish gallop is standard practice.

Are there no rules in debates? There should be. You’re not allowed to punch someone in basketball so why should you be allowed to DOS people with bullshit in a debate?

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#75

Post by Nevermark »

pottertheotter wrote: post #35
Nevermark wrote: post #14

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 fo…

Do you have any examples where you’ve used them for this? Would be interesting to see.

A simple example is I have a series of three ordered connected things.

I called the first one “pre” since it “precedes” the others.

I called the last one “pro” since it “proceeds” from the others.

These are somewhat poetic/whimsical terms, for an abstract arrangement, but it’s nice to have good terms even for non-serious stuff.

I couldn’t come up with an equally concise term for the middle.

Claude came up with “per” as in “through” for the middle thing.

Couldn’t be more fitting.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#76

Post by aspenmayer »

thethirdone wrote: post #71
aspenmayer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would prefer advising humans to increase length rather than restricting LLMs because of the cited effects. I would advise the opposite to humans, as your advice is playing to the strengths of AI/LLMs and away from the strengths of humans versus AI/LLMs.

Advising the opposite to humans does not make sense. 13 words is already tiny to convince someone. The choices I was thinking were restricting LLM word count and increasing human word count. The goal is specifically to make them more comparable. The given study does not show any strength of humans over LLMs. Both goal metrics (truthful and deceptive) are better for LLMs than humans. If you are misinterpreting my advi…

> If LLMs end up more convincing to humans than other humans simply because humans are too prideful to make their arguments longer, that seems like the worst possible future.

People aren’t too proud to make long arguments, they just take more time and effort to make for humans, and so historically, humans subconsciously consider longer arguments as more intellectually rigorous whether they are or not, and so length of a written piece is used as a kind of lazy heuristic corresponding with quality. When we're comparing the output of humans to that of other humans, this kind of approach may work to a certain extent, but AI/LLMs seem to be better at writing long pieces of text upon demand than humans. That humans find the LLM output more convincing if it is longer is not surprising to me, but I’ll agree with you that it isn’t a good sign either. The metric has become a target.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#77

Post by sidibe »

alpaca128 wrote: post #67
sidibe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Meanwhile I haven't seen any real progress that I'd care about in a while. Is GPT-4xyz better than the last one? I'm sure some benchmark numbers say that. But the number of applications where occasional hallucinations don't matter is very small, and where it matters nothing really changed. Companies are trying to use it for customer support but that predictably turned out to be a legal risk. Klarna went all-in on AI…

Yes they have gotten better. If you give Gemini 2.5 the right context it seems to solve whatever. Drop in the folder + docs and it tends to be right about how to proceed now. I think people who don't find LLMs useful now aren't trying with the right context.

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#78

Post by make3 »

Nevermark wrote: post #75
pottertheotter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples where you’ve used them for this? Would be interesting to see.

A simple example is I have a series of three ordered connected things. I called the first one “pre” since it “precedes” the others. I called the last one “pro” since it “proceeds” from the others. These are somewhat poetic/whimsical terms, for an abstract arrangement, but it’s nice to have good terms even for non-serious stuff. I couldn’t come up with an equally concise term for the middle. Claude came up with “per”…

publish this at ACL

Re: LLMs are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders

#80

Post by nimih »

OJFord wrote: post #63
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

Hamdiddle-eedah-hamdiddle-ah (do do do do dodododo expi-ali-do-cious) What is the point of that? They're incomprehensible. (For those who haven't watched it: the video just shows people talking very fast, it doesn't explain why, kind of implies it's somehow good or impressive.)

The point is to win debate tournaments. In particular, it is (or at least was, when I competed in policy debate in high school and college in the 00s) strategically advantageous to maximize the number of distinct arguments, each with their own set of supporting evidence (usually read verbatim from a prepared excerpt of a news article or authoritative reference or whatever), you make within the allocated time. This incentivizes talking extremely quickly, which requires a fair bit of practice to become proficient at (and to understand).
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