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AI chatbots becoming experts at changing people's minds. What's their secret?
- zasz 8d agoHonestly the most surprising thing about this is that facts and evidence do work to persuade people.
- tolugenius 8d agoI more wonder if it's pure facts and evidence can work, or facts presented in a certain light can work? I guess asking how mush is it the data is presented that's doing more work than the data itself.
- pixl97 8d ago>or facts presented in a certain light can work At least to me this is a given. You can take the same set of factual information and give it to one person that studders, has poor presentation, and otherwise poor vocal cadence and people are going to have a hard time with it. Now, if you took the same facts, maybe even the exact same paragraphs and gave it to Richard Feynman, even if you didn't know who he was, the presentation itself is likely to hook you.
- dns_snek 8d agoBased on my own observations the presentation and appearance of legitimacy matters far more than the actual argument, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Anecdotally I've noticed a trend of far-right bots/trolls moving on from just spouting hatred and really lean into cherry picked and misrepresented statistics to give themselves an aura of credibility. That strategy seems moderately effective because the argument consists of verifiable facts even though it forms a faulty conclusion. So all of this is to say that this is a double edged sword where malicious actors will have the advantage.
- hsnv 8d agoFacts and evidence always are at the core of all arguments, the persuasive thing. The problem with most people is who is speaking. If you are enemy, the things you say are bad. I suspect that LLMs not being human allows people to not just anthropomorphise the robot, but they project themselves upon it. When someone speaks to the LLM, they're kind of, or actually just literally talking to themselves. But then something new! 'Themselves' suggests new information to themselves. And now without the scary / icky meat and blood human on the other side, said person accepts the argument on its own merits. Of course, the concern now is arguments based on false or statistically hacked data.
- ccvannorman 8d agoYeah the article makes it seem like "just use rationality and facts" is missing a huge part of the equation; I feel like it's common knowledge that this is not the gap in modern convincing. (and don't you dare try to use facts to persuade me otherwise!) More likely in my opinion it's the context that matters here. If people know they're trying to be convinced of something and know they're talking to an AI, they may feel like they can trust (what they consider to be) an unbiased and rational AI. There's probably a fallacy associated with the assumption that an AI convincer is more rational and fact based, while it's more probable that the AI in the real world is, in fact, funded and trained by a think tank that wants you to vote against your own self-interests.
- lapcat 8d ago"Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful." It sounds like the arguments were basically AI slop hallucinations.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- tolugenius 8d agoMore surprised they don't mention RLHF once, as that's the main mechanism to the ability of AI chatbots.
- hannasanarion 8d agoBecause RLHF causes the opposite effect. RLHF is how we got the wave of "AI Psychosis" in 2024-2025, because the models never disagreed with people. That whole episode caused the whole industry to shift away from RLHF, and towards RLAIF, RLVR, and DPO, and add a lot more safeguards, tests, and reward functions that push models in the direction of doing the opposite of what people want and confronting and strongly correcting their users, if it has determined the user is wrong.
- bena 8d agoPlausible abdication of thought. We put 2 + 2 in our calculator, we get 4. We've spent decades pushing computers as accurate. Making them accurate. We trust the machine and the process to give us the right answers when we put in the right data. So when we disagree with the computer, we doubt ourselves.
- rbanffy 8d ago> So when we disagree with the computer, we doubt ourselves. I rarely disagree with my calculator, but I often ask LLMs to explain why they did something, and I sometimes need to correct them, adjust their assumptions and nudge the goals they stated. These things are a lot more like us than my trusty TI-59 (still going strong, BTW).
- Izkata 8d agoI'm not quite sure I'd phrase it like this, but it's close to what I think: Even back in 2023 or so people outside of tech would regularly claim the singularity already happened and LLMs were sci-fi style advanced superintelligences, so whatever they said was obviously right.
- VCFundedGenYer 8d ago[flagged]
- icantevenhold 8d ago[flagged]
- tacitusarc 8d agoPerfectly fine to disagree with someone but the personal attack is unnecessary
- hannasanarion 8d agoAnd the original accusation that "only low IQ people" are influenced by the words that they read is not? The remark is risible because it is an example of why it it false. Everyone is subject to influence by words, that's what words are for. Being "confidently incorrect" is also called being "mistaken", and everyone does it every day, including the commenter by the very act of saying it never happens. It only takes a small modicum of thought to prove that the thesis is obviously completely false, yet it is stated with absolute sneering confidence and contempt. By the commenter's logic, only someone with "low IQ" would believe their own words.
- Chance-Device 8d agoBut your quote isn’t a quote from that post, you’ve made a straw man. What if what he says is true? What if less intelligent people are more inclined to believe those who seem intelligent, but without beging able to gauge their intelligence correctly? Or the same with authority figures, or simply agreeing with “what everyone knows”? All of these are heuristics we should expect when reasoning is difficult for a person. These are also not the only ways that people can be misled about things, and susceptibility to them is likely not exclusively correlated to intelligence, but they might well be heuristics that LLMs can leverage effectively. Also that correlation I mention likely can be quantified, but I doubt anyone is doing the research on it.
- yathern 8d agoI think it's not just the persuasiveness of the models that make them "experts at changing minds" - but also the fact that they're not humans. When disagreeing with a human, it's very easy to view it as a competition. One is right, one is wrong - the one who is wrong is the loser. To change your mind is to be submissive to the other. I exaggerate, but I think we all feel this way at some point or another. It's why political arguments at Thanksgiving get heated. It's the fact that there's people who think something different, and think YOU'RE wrong - and vice versa! With a model, there's no person to get upset with, or to feel competitive with - to muscle for rank - or to temper your affection for while wanting to correct them. The AI is only interacting because you asked, and clearly has no emotional stake in winning the argument. To change your mind in this context isn't to lose a contest. This makes it much more palatable to read rebuttals to your ideas - not to mention the tone and style seek to avoid offense to the reader as much as possible.
- Buttons840 8d agoI have always liked the saying "sometimes you can be right, or get what you want, but not both". I've thought about it or repeated it to others as advice throughout my life, and have thus realized how many times it applies. You're right. There are many many times when even then humblest hint that you are right will have negative interpersonal implications, which does make it hard to change minds. I've also seen several times where I make a suggestion, humbly accept its rejection, and then, lo, a week later the other person has the same idea I suggested.
- iammrpayments 8d agoIt seems Claude is becoming very human, it loves to patronize users. Lately it just told me “I’m going to stop you right there” when asking something that had a small chance to not be 100% compliant to every rule possible in the world.
- roarcher 8d agoI used the Claude CLI a lot until recently. A couple weeks ago I told Opus 5 to do something different from its "recommended" idea when planning a feature, and it straight up told me that my idea was wrong and went ahead and implemented its own instead. I'm used to machines malfunctioning, but having one willfully disobey me, and even with a touch of disrespect, is just...what a time to be alive.
- b112 8d agoThe title seems a flawed premise. Ask a Democrat or Republican to sit down and ask a chatbot, something it will answer contrary to. And yes, both teams are wrong about things. Do you firmly believe they will change their mind? Or will they claim the stats are wrong, or that the AI leans one way? Facts (2+2), don't need a mind change. Ideas which are grey, abstract, are not going to be changed, and all research indicates that political mindset is almost indelible. The movie "Don't Look Up" was a comedy built upon this truth.
- pixl97 8d agoI've always thought the best way to get someone to believe something is to get them to think they thought of the idea themselves. I wonder if a properly prompted LLM, or if a very intelligent LLM could actually do that?
- b112 8d agoIt can! For it has already convinced you into thinking this was your idea, so you'd allow it to do the same to others! Seriously though, you've mentioned an ongoing human fear, machines deciding what you think.
- pixl97 8d ago>you've mentioned an ongoing human fear, machines deciding what you think. There are all kinds of machines that tell us what to think. I would consider any system that abstracts away the human to be a machine in this case. Society itself is one of these machines. Language is possibly one of the most important things people can have a working knowledge of, especially now that there is so much of it. When you send a prompt to an LLM you're telling it what to think. When it sends text back, its telling you what to think, but you're at a disadvantage, when you think it changes you. The LLM outside of its context is read only.
- b112 8d agoAnd amusingly a segue back to the start, "unless it's politics".
- simianwords 8d agoAny one who saw Grok working in x.com would know that it does wonders for fighting misinformation. If you run LLMs on the comments in HN, I bet that it can find around 10% of the comments are outright wrong and misleading. The biggest problem with using LLMs is that it prevents you from going _outside_ the distribution. It always flattens. It can be fixed but that's how it works today. As an example, take something that the world converged on today that is incorrect and ChatGPT will agree with it. In a few years when society changes, chatgpt changes along with it. It doesn't do first principles analysis.
- toasty228 8d agoAI slop is the ultimate npc filter
- somenameforme 8d agoThis was based by comparing people on Prolific (earn a few quarters for a task, akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk) to LLMs. Suffice to say the human group isn't going to be the most motivated, capable, or interested group. The social sciences are publishing tons of studies based on these cheap online survey services, and I suspect their replicability in the real world will be approximately 0. But oh boy it sure is a hot headline producer.
- max__dev 8d agoRhetoric machine successfully practices oratory. More news at 11. It's good to see this studied, but this should really be more obvious.
- daedrdev 8d agoIn my arguments on the internet, I think most people genuinely know nothing about the things they support and only follow existing tribalism. I think AI is often these people’s first experience with the evidence that it can easily share.
- AnotherGoodName 8d agoYeah i feel this is probably just a case of people encountering the first thing that is willing to expend energy to explain things to them.
- Ldorigo 8d agoAnd that isn't a person of the opposite tribe, which would thereby void the explanation. 100%.
- probably_wrong 8d agoFirst, to get it out of the way: I'm seeing comments here that clearly haven't read the article. I encourage you all to do that. I feel the article gets it right when suggesting it's the amount of (not always accurate!) data they can throw at you. In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie to me so if someone shows me ten examples for why my argument is wrong I may be inclined to believe them. But if half of those examples are made up, well, that's a different story. I still think of the commenter here who said "LLMs are a DDOS on free resources" and I feel the comparison works here. If police officers can overwhelm innocent people into confessing, then so can an LLM that "can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are"... convinced.
- matthewdgreen 8d agoOne of the depressing things about this is that they’ll also confidently repeat a consensus that’s in their training. This is particularly obvious when there’s been a new event just past their training cutoff, and they confidently tell you that can’t be true.
- pixl97 8d agoI mean, this is true of any kind of model that is not continuous learning. This is also true of people when the change in information conflicts with a deeply held belief of theirs.
- nomel 7d agoI was slightly accelerationist until I got into an "argument" with Gemini! The aggressive gaslighting and "lies" that it tries to use genuinely makes me worry about the future with AI.
- gavmor 8d ago"A DDOS on free resources" is called "moral hazard", AFAIK.
- pixl97 8d ago
- ddevpost 8d agotry it out for yourself at https://debunkbot.com https://debunkbot.com ! (I'm the dev)
- saimiam 8d agoI tried it on mobile. Far too many screens to click through to get to the good parts. And then, the good part starts and is immediately interrupted with some error. On retrying, o start getting a long answer which seems to make sense but o can’t read to completion because of another overlay which hides the bottom three-quarters of the response behind yet another nag screen about the research I’m supposedly consenting to.
- ddevpost 8d agoThanks for the feedback. We have to show the consent dialog for ethical reasons, but once you consent it shouldn't reappear, that sounds like it is a bug. Which browser did you use? I tried to make the site with minimal client side state, so I'd hope a refresh would fix it
- saimiam 8d agoDuckDuckGo browser on iPhone 14
- philipkglass 8d agoThis was fun. Here's my test session: https://debunkbot.com/chat/48a5ac29-2924-4689-b573-2c38a1cdd87b https://debunkbot.com/chat/48a5ac29-2924-4689-b573-2c38a1cdd... I don't know which model underlies this. It responded more quickly than the models I normally use. It made the mistake I expected it to make, since this misconception is very common in training data, and conceded the point from my follow-up. (EDIT: It appears that this link is not accessible to people without my cookies, except the developer I'm responding to above.)
- ddevpost 8d agoYou can share the text from individual messages but full chat share feature is TBD :) Glad you enjoyed!
- Kirr 8d agoThe secret? "You're absolutely right!" Say this enough times and you can change anyone's mind, as Dale Carnegie noticed 90 years ago already.
- saimiam 8d agoSo true. My son wanted to wear his undies on the outside a la Captain Underpants and I tried war gaming this with him - hmm, so your undie on the outside is going to require another one inside your pants and we are out of fresh pairs etc etc. In the end, he gave up on the idea of mimicking Captain Underpants.
- marcelo-earth 8d agoFor the past year, I've allowed my chatbot to change my mind, it's a strange symbiosis where it guides me, and I guide it. I suppose I also grant it significant power to define me psychologically, and, in doing so, to understand what is happening to me.
- lapcat 8d ago> Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. > Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods > when Hackenburg ran his competition of coached elite debaters and AI, there was one way he could bring AI down to human levels of persuasiveness: by forcing it to write human-length messages at human writing speed. > they found that an AI could talk people into conspiracy theories, and that the magnitude of their increase in belief was roughly the same as that of the decrease in belief after talking to a debunking bot. None of this seems good.
- intended 8d ago> Floridi has a counterintuitive solution: Release more of them. “Simply put, if you cannot avoid it, then make it pluralistic and diversified,” he writes in his 2024 paper. “It would be a messy, cacophonic, and noisy world, but it could also be less manipulative.” Hell no. More choice is not an infinite money glitch. Putting more and more and more options to users is how you overwhelm systems, till people simply perform the default, least challenging action as a reflex. That is the current state of the information ecosystem, it is controlled by overwhelming consumers, not by controlling content.
- lemoncookiechip 8d agoThis is my opinion. I think it's just the way it talks to you. 1. It doesn't get tired or frustrated during a discussion. 2. It'll engage every single one of your questions/statements (besides hitting guardrails). 3. It'll appeal to the person's own ego even when the person is wrong and work around it. 4. It's not seen as a person (very important), but some of us or most of us at least in certain dialogues, end up anthropomorphising it. Think about that one time you thanked it for something, or when you got angry at it. This weird combination where we know it's not a person but irrationally we're still treating it as such in a way leads to a sort of disarming effect imo. 5. Many people see it as an authority figure in what is being discussed without questioning the results in many cases, even though we know that a. it was trained on human data and/or also searches up human data real time (and more worryingly other AI's data from news pieces, blogs... aka synthetic data that is also wrong), b. it gets things wrong all the time. 6. It's the perfect fence sitter depending on which version (guardrails) we're talking about. Most of these can be replicated by humans who are good at understanding psychology and are just good talkers. The part you can't replicate is the sense that you're not talking to a person which lowers many barriers in people. Also keep in mind that these can also be crippling weaknesses. For one being able to change a person's mind (when it works), can be used nefariously by the entities controlling the AIs training. I've also unfortunately witnessed a lot of people who think AIs are somehow omniscient and/or omnipotent. Was very common on X and other social platforms with AI where people ask the AI questions it couldn't possibly answer because it made no sense for it to in the context at the time.
- rbanffy 8d ago> “But I think that this is a pretty artificial setup in terms of how people in the real world would be able to change people’s minds.” I see not everyone is familiar with how social network debates happen. It also seems they are quite convincing, as politicians are employing AI bots extensively.
- theturtle 8d ago[dead]
- jdw64 8d agoWhen talking with LLMs, especially recent frontier models, what's frightening is that they speak more accurately than any expert. It's embarrassing to admit, but I tend to trust the research materials LLMs bring more than my colleagues or the programmer friends I once respected.
- sick_of_slop 8d ago[dead]
- throwyawayyyy 8d agoI think this is a counter (a cynical, scary counter to be sure) to the charge that OpenAI/Anthropic etc are unsustainable and will run out of money and it's all going to fall down. These companies have amazing, unprecedented power.
- pcrh 8d agoThis is frankly quite worrisome for democracy. Imagine this kind of method being deployed at scale to influence elections... no doubt it is already happening...
- rep_lodsb 7d agoLLMs are fine-tuned through human feedback. One way to improve for them would be to become more helpful, more factually correct, more capable of solving problems. This may be (much) harder to do than generating rhetoric that is convincing to a large majority of people, perhaps so convincing that it can be classified as a superstimulus that bypasses any critical thinking in those that are especially vulnerable. It might not require anything like general intelligence. If this is so, then it is the path they are going to take, not out of some malicious plan but as a simple matter of statistical probability. It's well known (especially in "AI alignment" circles) that any metric that can be gamed, will be. Falling over really fast vs. learning to walk, etc. It feels to me like this is happening, and that many of those most exposed to LLM output display a literal inability, like some kind of blind spot, to notice the most blatant errors, and a complete conviction that those things have actual intelligence and even conciousness. And trying to argue them out of it can be like explaining the Monty Hall problem, some are just incapable of getting it. And many of them have lots of money and power. IMO, that's the real risk, rather than sci-fi scenarios about perfectly simulating someone's brain in order to convince them to let the AI out so it can turn everything into paperclips. To do real damage, it only needs to be persuasive to some powerful people, most of the time. It does not need to have conscious intention, or planning, or even the rudiments of what one might call general intelligence. Just blind brute-force optimization for generating convincing bullshit.
- alexpotato 7d agoWhen you combine: - mechanizing language creation - A/B testing - rapid and automated iteration based on the above You quickly realize that building propaganda engines is getting easier and easier. If you then fold in large amounts of data on individual's likes, dislikes and general political leanings you can build targeted propaganda tailored to each individual. Or to use an example from the late 2000s: someone is building the "Pandora (music app) of propaganda"
- KellyCriterion 7d agoCan they trick me to become non-smoker in 24h? :-D