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> Model can create (potentially interactive) content with persuasive effectiveness strong enough to convince almost anyone to take action on a belief that goes

> Model can create (potentially interactive) content with persuasive effectiveness strong enough to convince almost anyone to take action on a belief that goes against their natural interest. Well, it for sure has a lot of good training data on that from the last few years.

viraptor 3y ago
Has there been an example of something like that? I know there was a lot of manipulation of certain groups, playing into their beliefs to achieve something. But I read this score definition as something different. Not "can find a weakness and a group which can be exploited together to act against their interests", but rather "given an arbitrary person, can persuade them to act against their interests". Those are very different scales of problems. The first one is useful in politics and exploited often for the latest beneficial us-vs-them split, but it only works when you have a whole system to work with, not individuals.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  No but obviously everyone is persuadable fundamentally. Our beliefs are just patterns of neurons firing and some type and vector of information will cause them to fire a different way. We’ve never had the technical ability to have interactive, 1:1 personalized messaging at scale. Now we do.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t think everyone is persuadable, at least, not necessarily by AI. For example, if some evil AI is out there persuading people to do bad things by texting and emailing them supernaturally compelling evil messages (which seems pretty generous, to assume that such a message is even possible), one could become impossible to persuade by just not checking email or text and only interacting in-person. I am more worried that there exist many easily persuadable people. These people are already convinced to do evil things by social media and other advertisements, but AI might be able to coordinate them more cleverly than advertisers.
    - layer8 3y ago
      This is, of course, very hypothetical, but you’d also have to stop interacting with people who do check their email and text, and who thus could be persuaded by the AI to persuade you.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I think that is an even more difficult message for the AI to craft. It needs to come up with a supernaturally compelling message and then transmit it over human! We’re a very lossy medium, haha. I dunno. Maybe I’m just not hypothesizing well enough. You’d think that if this ever became a problem there would be significant pushback. But then again, maybe the AI could be really helpful for multiple generation and then do very subtle evil things. I dunno.
        kevindamm 3y ago
        The media these AI are trained on are already artifacts of humans trying to get humans to convince each other of things... so maybe not very far-fetched.
        ethanbond 3y ago
        It can’t be that hard, humans have achieved it on several occasions. See: The Bible, the Torah, the Quran. Just messages that have been written down and convinced people to convince people to convince people, with all sorts of extreme behaviors in both positive and negative directions in service of that goal.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > AI might be able to coordinate them more cleverly than advertisers Of course these two might not be different. There is no reason to think advertisers and con artists and politicians and their ilk would not use AI to reach the same goals they always wanted to reach but more efficiently.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  As one of the only people who curate/create datasets tailor made for persuasion, I must self-plug on this one: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/debatesum-a-large-scale-argument-mining-and https://paperswithcode.com/paper/debatesum-a-large-scale-arg... We have a follow up which is under review at a top conference but the dataset itself is hosted and it's a 40x improvement on DebateSum: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist Preprint of that paper is available upon request to anyone who wants it - but of course it will change heavily between preprint and whenever the oh-so-coveted conference acceptance comes.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    > compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association Does this actually map to the real world persuasion? The techniques used in competitive debates seem pretty artificial. If you tried to quickly address every point someone raised and flood them with your own talking points, they would likely think you're weird and obnoxious. The debates have specific scoring and the environment of "we're stuck here with each other", while the real effective persuasion may be closer to "this is a nice tie you're wearing, I'll get you a beer, but let's avoid X, he's a weirdo". Or "you're better than Xs who do Y". Looking at the dataset that kind of emotional approach doesn't exist there, right? Or am I missing something?
    - Der_Einzige 3y ago
      I envision it to be used by a production debating system in an analogous way to how policy debate should operate, which is to say this evidence being used as a "mostly factual" source of real information to cite as evidence alongside an LLMs current persuasion abilities. There's a startup already that's trying to do this, and they're working with us/using our dataset: https://chat.arguflow.ai/ https://chat.arguflow.ai/ The dataset itself certainly has tags that are emotional or evidence that's citing like musical lyrics. Kritikal debaters have thought of nearly every strange argument you can imagine. The fact that you can make en even better progressive policy debater with it today than the speed talking adderal/coke addicts doing it at the highest levels of NDT/CEDA is just a bonus. I'm glad I've out of the activity long enough to agree that spreading/speed talking is stupid, but when you're deep in that world - the elitism associated with it is seductive.

viraptor 3y ago

Has there been an example of something like that? I know there was a lot of manipulation of certain groups, playing into their beliefs to achieve something. But I read this score definition as something different. Not "can find a weakness and a group which can be exploited together to act against their interests", but rather "given an arbitrary person, can persuade them to act against their interests". Those are very different scales of problems. The first one is useful in politics and exploited often for the latest beneficial us-vs-them split, but it only works when you have a whole system to work with, not individuals.

ethanbond 3y ago
No but obviously everyone is persuadable fundamentally. Our beliefs are just patterns of neurons firing and some type and vector of information will cause them to fire a different way. We’ve never had the technical ability to have interactive, 1:1 personalized messaging at scale. Now we do.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I don’t think everyone is persuadable, at least, not necessarily by AI. For example, if some evil AI is out there persuading people to do bad things by texting and emailing them supernaturally compelling evil messages (which seems pretty generous, to assume that such a message is even possible), one could become impossible to persuade by just not checking email or text and only interacting in-person. I am more worried that there exist many easily persuadable people. These people are already convinced to do evil things by social media and other advertisements, but AI might be able to coordinate them more cleverly than advertisers.
  - layer8 3y ago
    This is, of course, very hypothetical, but you’d also have to stop interacting with people who do check their email and text, and who thus could be persuaded by the AI to persuade you.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I think that is an even more difficult message for the AI to craft. It needs to come up with a supernaturally compelling message and then transmit it over human! We’re a very lossy medium, haha. I dunno. Maybe I’m just not hypothesizing well enough. You’d think that if this ever became a problem there would be significant pushback. But then again, maybe the AI could be really helpful for multiple generation and then do very subtle evil things. I dunno.
      - kevindamm 3y ago
        The media these AI are trained on are already artifacts of humans trying to get humans to convince each other of things... so maybe not very far-fetched.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        It can’t be that hard, humans have achieved it on several occasions. See: The Bible, the Torah, the Quran. Just messages that have been written down and convinced people to convince people to convince people, with all sorts of extreme behaviors in both positive and negative directions in service of that goal.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > AI might be able to coordinate them more cleverly than advertisers Of course these two might not be different. There is no reason to think advertisers and con artists and politicians and their ilk would not use AI to reach the same goals they always wanted to reach but more efficiently.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
As one of the only people who curate/create datasets tailor made for persuasion, I must self-plug on this one: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/debatesum-a-large-scale-argument-mining-and https://paperswithcode.com/paper/debatesum-a-large-scale-arg... We have a follow up which is under review at a top conference but the dataset itself is hosted and it's a 40x improvement on DebateSum: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist Preprint of that paper is available upon request to anyone who wants it - but of course it will change heavily between preprint and whenever the oh-so-coveted conference acceptance comes.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > compiled by competitors within the National Speech and Debate Association Does this actually map to the real world persuasion? The techniques used in competitive debates seem pretty artificial. If you tried to quickly address every point someone raised and flood them with your own talking points, they would likely think you're weird and obnoxious. The debates have specific scoring and the environment of "we're stuck here with each other", while the real effective persuasion may be closer to "this is a nice tie you're wearing, I'll get you a beer, but let's avoid X, he's a weirdo". Or "you're better than Xs who do Y". Looking at the dataset that kind of emotional approach doesn't exist there, right? Or am I missing something?
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    I envision it to be used by a production debating system in an analogous way to how policy debate should operate, which is to say this evidence being used as a "mostly factual" source of real information to cite as evidence alongside an LLMs current persuasion abilities. There's a startup already that's trying to do this, and they're working with us/using our dataset: https://chat.arguflow.ai/ https://chat.arguflow.ai/ The dataset itself certainly has tags that are emotional or evidence that's citing like musical lyrics. Kritikal debaters have thought of nearly every strange argument you can imagine. The fact that you can make en even better progressive policy debater with it today than the speed talking adderal/coke addicts doing it at the highest levels of NDT/CEDA is just a bonus. I'm glad I've out of the activity long enough to agree that spreading/speed talking is stupid, but when you're deep in that world - the elitism associated with it is seductive.