The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hackenburg, Kobi, Tappin, Ben M., Hewitt, Luke, Saunders, Ed, Black, Sid, Lin, Hause, Fist, Catherine, Margetts, Helen, Rand, David G., Summerfield, Christopher
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hackenburg, Kobi
Tappin, Ben M.
Hewitt, Luke
Saunders, Ed
Black, Sid
Lin, Hause
Fist, Catherine
Margetts, Helen
Rand, David G.
Summerfield, Christopher
author_facet Hackenburg, Kobi
Tappin, Ben M.
Hewitt, Luke
Saunders, Ed
Black, Sid
Lin, Hause
Fist, Catherine
Margetts, Helen
Rand, David G.
Summerfield, Christopher
contents There are widespread fears that conversational AI could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. Here, in three large-scale experiments (N=76,977), we deployed 19 LLMs-including some post-trained explicitly for persuasion-to evaluate their persuasiveness on 707 political issues. We then checked the factual accuracy of 466,769 resulting LLM claims. Contrary to popular concerns, we show that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem more from post-training and prompting methods-which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51% and 27% respectively-than from personalization or increasing model scale. We further show that these methods increased persuasion by exploiting LLMs' unique ability to rapidly access and strategically deploy information and that, strikingly, where they increased AI persuasiveness they also systematically decreased factual accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_13919
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI
Hackenburg, Kobi
Tappin, Ben M.
Hewitt, Luke
Saunders, Ed
Black, Sid
Lin, Hause
Fist, Catherine
Margetts, Helen
Rand, David G.
Summerfield, Christopher
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
There are widespread fears that conversational AI could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. Here, in three large-scale experiments (N=76,977), we deployed 19 LLMs-including some post-trained explicitly for persuasion-to evaluate their persuasiveness on 707 political issues. We then checked the factual accuracy of 466,769 resulting LLM claims. Contrary to popular concerns, we show that the persuasive power of current and near-future AI is likely to stem more from post-training and prompting methods-which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51% and 27% respectively-than from personalization or increasing model scale. We further show that these methods increased persuasion by exploiting LLMs' unique ability to rapidly access and strategically deploy information and that, strikingly, where they increased AI persuasiveness they also systematically decreased factual accuracy.
title The Levers of Political Persuasion with Conversational AI
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13919