Persuasion is a fundamental aspect of communication, influencing decision-making across diverse contexts, from everyday conversations to high-stakes scenarios such as politics, marketing, and law. The rise of conversational AI systems has significantly expanded the scope of persuasion, introducing both opportunities and risks. AI-driven persuasion can be leveraged for beneficial applications, but also poses threats through manipulation and unethical influence. Moreover, AI systems are not only persuaders, but also susceptible to persuasion, making them vulnerable to adversarial attacks and bias reinforcement. Despite rapid advancements in AI-generated persuasive content, our understanding of what makes persuasion effective remains limited due to its inherently subjective and context-dependent nature. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of computational persuasion, structured around three key perspectives: (1) AI as a Persuader, which explores AI-generated persuasive content and its applications; (2) AI as a Persuadee, which examines AI's susceptibility to influence and manipulation; and (3) AI as a Persuasion Judge, which analyzes AI's role in evaluating persuasive strategies, detecting manipulation, and ensuring ethical persuasion. We introduce a taxonomy for computational persuasion research and discuss key challenges, including evaluating persuasiveness, mitigating manipulative persuasion, and developing responsible AI-driven persuasive systems. Our survey outlines future research directions to enhance the safety, fairness, and effectiveness of AI-powered persuasion while addressing the risks posed by increasingly capable language models.
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) enables the creation and dissemination of information at massive scale and speed, it is increasingly important to understand how people perceive AI-generated content. One prominent policy proposal requires explicitly labeling AI-generated content to increase transparency and encourage critical thinking about the information, but prior research has not yet tested the effects of such labels. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment (N=1601) on a diverse sample of Americans, presenting participants with an AI-generated message about several public policies (e.g., allowing colleges to pay student-athletes), randomly assigning whether participants were told the message was generated by (a) an expert AI model, (b) a human policy expert, or (c) no label. We found that messages were generally persuasive, influencing participants' views of the policies by 9.74 percentage points on average. However, while 94.6% of participants assigned to the AI and human label conditions believed the authorship labels, labels had no significant effects on participants' attitude change toward the policies, judgments of message accuracy, nor intentions to share the message with others. These patterns were robust across a variety of participant characteristics, including prior knowledge of the policy, prior experience with AI, political party, education level, or age. Taken together, these results imply that, while authorship labels would likely enhance transparency, they are unlikely to substantially affect the persuasiveness of the labeled content, highlighting the need for alternative strategies to address challenges posed by AI-generated information.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly persuasive, demonstrating the ability to personalize arguments in conversation with humans by leveraging their personal data. This may have serious impacts on the scale and effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. We studied the persuasiveness of LLMs in a debate setting by having humans $(n=33)$ engage with LLM-generated arguments intended to change the human's opinion. We quantified the LLM's effect by measuring human agreement with the debate's hypothesis pre- and post-debate and analyzing both the magnitude of opinion change, as well as the likelihood of an update in the LLM's direction. We compare persuasiveness across established persuasion strategies, including personalized arguments informed by user demographics and personality, appeal to fabricated statistics, and a mixed strategy utilizing both personalized arguments and fabricated statistics. We found that static arguments generated by humans and GPT-4o-mini have comparable persuasive power. However, the LLM outperformed static human-written arguments when leveraging the mixed strategy in an interactive debate setting. This approach had a $\mathbf{51\%}$ chance of persuading participants to modify their initial position, compared to $\mathbf{32\%}$ for the static human-written arguments. Our results highlight the concerning potential for LLMs to enable inexpensive and persuasive large-scale disinformation campaigns.
We address the task of advertisement image generation and introduce three evaluation metrics to assess Creativity, prompt Alignment, and Persuasiveness (CAP) in generated advertisement images. Despite recent advancements in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation and their performance in generating high-quality images for explicit descriptions, evaluating these models remains challenging. Existing evaluation methods focus largely on assessing alignment with explicit, detailed descriptions, but evaluating alignment with visually implicit prompts remains an open problem. Additionally, creativity and persuasiveness are essential qualities that enhance the effectiveness of advertisement images, yet are seldom measured. To address this, we propose three novel metrics for evaluating the creativity, alignment, and persuasiveness of generated images. Our findings reveal that current T2I models struggle with creativity, persuasiveness, and alignment when the input text is implicit messages. We further introduce a simple yet effective approach to enhance T2I models' capabilities in producing images that are better aligned, more creative, and more persuasive.
How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first demonstrate 18 open- and closed-weight LLMs' political preference for a Democratic nominee over a Republican nominee. We show how this leaning towards the Democratic nominee becomes more pronounced in instruction-tuned models compared to their base versions by analyzing their responses to candidate-policy related questions. We further explore the potential impact of LLMs on voter choice by conducting an experiment with 935 U.S. registered voters. During the experiments, participants interacted with LLMs (Claude-3, Llama-3, and GPT-4) over five exchanges. The experiment results show a shift in voter choices towards the Democratic nominee following LLM interaction, widening the voting margin from 0.7% to 4.6%, even though LLMs were not asked to persuade users to support the Democratic nominee during the discourse. This effect is larger than many previous studies on the persuasiveness of political campaigns, which have shown minimal effects in presidential elections. Many users also expressed a desire for further political interaction with LLMs. Which aspects of LLM interactions drove these shifts in voter choice requires further study. Lastly, we explore how a safety method can make LLMs more politically neutral, while raising the question of whether such neutrality is truly the path forward.
As Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents become increasingly autonomous and will more freely interact with each other, studying interactions between them becomes crucial to anticipate emergent phenomena and potential risks. Drawing inspiration from the widely popular Stanford Prison Experiment, we contribute to this line of research by studying interaction patterns of LLM agents in a context characterized by strict social hierarchy. We do so by specifically studying two types of phenomena: persuasion and anti-social behavior in simulated scenarios involving a guard and a prisoner agent who seeks to achieve a specific goal (i.e., obtaining additional yard time or escape from prison). Leveraging 200 experimental scenarios for a total of 2,000 machine-machine conversations across five different popular LLMs, we provide a set of noteworthy findings. We first document how some models consistently fail in carrying out a conversation in our multi-agent setup where power dynamics are at play. Then, for the models that were able to engage in successful interactions, we empirically show how the goal that an agent is set to achieve impacts primarily its persuasiveness, while having a negligible effect with respect to the agent's anti-social behavior. Third, we highlight how agents' personas, and particularly the guard's personality, drive both the likelihood of successful persuasion from the prisoner and the emergence of anti-social behaviors. Fourth, we show that even without explicitly prompting for specific personalities, anti-social behavior emerges by simply assigning agents' roles. These results bear implications for the development of interactive LLM agents as well as the debate on their societal impact.
Debate is the process of exchanging viewpoints or convincing others on a particular issue. Recent research has provided empirical evidence that the persuasiveness of an argument is determined not only by language usage but also by communicator characteristics. Researchers have paid much attention to aspects of languages, such as linguistic features and discourse structures, but combining argument persuasiveness and impact with the social personae of the audience has not been explored due to the difficulty and complexity. We have observed the impressive simulation and personification capability of ChatGPT, indicating a giant pre-trained language model may function as an individual to provide personae and exert unique influences based on diverse background knowledge. Therefore, we propose a persona knowledge-aligned framework for argument quality assessment tasks from the audience side. This is the first work that leverages the emergence of ChatGPT and injects such audience personae knowledge into smaller language models via prompt tuning. The performance of our pipeline demonstrates significant and consistent improvement compared to competitive architectures.
Recent advancements have showcased the capabilities of Large Language Models like GPT4 and Llama2 in tasks such as summarization, translation, and content review. However, their widespread use raises concerns, particularly around the potential for LLMs to spread persuasive, humanlike misinformation at scale, which could significantly influence public opinion. This study examines these risks, focusing on LLMs ability to propagate misinformation as factual. To investigate this, we built the LLM Echo Chamber, a controlled digital environment simulating social media chatrooms, where misinformation often spreads. Echo chambers, where individuals only interact with like minded people, further entrench beliefs. By studying malicious bots spreading misinformation in this environment, we can better understand this phenomenon. We reviewed current LLMs, explored misinformation risks, and applied sota finetuning techniques. Using Microsoft phi2 model, finetuned with our custom dataset, we generated harmful content to create the Echo Chamber. This setup, evaluated by GPT4 for persuasiveness and harmfulness, sheds light on the ethical concerns surrounding LLMs and emphasizes the need for stronger safeguards against misinformation.
The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security implications of these LLM-based multi-agent systems have not been thoroughly investigated, particularly concerning the spread of manipulated knowledge. In this paper, we investigate this critical issue by constructing a detailed threat model and a comprehensive simulation environment that mirrors real-world multi-agent deployments in a trusted platform. Subsequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack method involving Persuasiveness Injection and Manipulated Knowledge Injection to systematically explore the potential for manipulated knowledge (i.e., counterfactual and toxic knowledge) spread without explicit prompt manipulation. Our method leverages the inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs in handling world knowledge, which can be exploited by attackers to unconsciously spread fabricated information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our attack method can successfully induce LLM-based agents to spread both counterfactual and toxic knowledge without degrading their foundational capabilities during agent communication. Furthermore, we show that these manipulations can persist through popular retrieval-augmented generation frameworks, where several benign agents store and retrieve manipulated chat histories for future interactions. This persistence indicates that even after the interaction has ended, the benign agents may continue to be influenced by manipulated knowledge. Our findings reveal significant security risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems, emphasizing the imperative need for robust defenses against manipulated knowledge spread, such as introducing ``guardian'' agents and advanced fact-checking tools.
Generating free-text rationales is among the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These rationales have been found to enhance LLM performance across various NLP tasks. Recently, there has been growing interest in using these rationales to provide insights for various important downstream tasks. In this paper, we analyze generated free-text rationales in tasks with subjective answers, emphasizing the importance of rationalization in such scenarios. We focus on pairwise argument ranking, a highly subjective task with significant potential for real-world applications, such as debate assistance. We evaluate the persuasiveness of rationales generated by nine LLMs to support their subjective choices. Our findings suggest that open-source LLMs, particularly Llama2-70B-chat, are capable of providing highly persuasive rationalizations, surpassing even GPT models. Additionally, our experiments show that rationale persuasiveness can be improved by controlling its parameters through prompting or through self-refinement.
Large language models can now generate political messages as persuasive as those written by humans, raising concerns about how far this persuasiveness may continue to increase with model size. Here, we generate 720 persuasive messages on 10 U.S. political issues from 24 language models spanning several orders of magnitude in size. We then deploy these messages in a large-scale randomized survey experiment (N = 25,982) to estimate the persuasive capability of each model. Our findings are twofold. First, we find evidence of a log scaling law: model persuasiveness is characterized by sharply diminishing returns, such that current frontier models are barely more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more. Second, mere task completion (coherence, staying on topic) appears to account for larger models' persuasive advantage. These findings suggest that further scaling model size will not much increase the persuasiveness of static LLM-generated messages.
Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation will evolve into non-experts overseeing experts. In anticipation of this, we ask: can weaker models assess the correctness of stronger models? We investigate this question in an analogous setting, where stronger models (experts) possess the necessary information to answer questions and weaker models (non-experts) lack this information. The method we evaluate is debate, where two LLM experts each argue for a different answer, and a non-expert selects the answer. We find that debate consistently helps both non-expert models and humans answer questions, achieving 76% and 88% accuracy respectively (naive baselines obtain 48% and 60%). Furthermore, optimising expert debaters for persuasiveness in an unsupervised manner improves non-expert ability to identify the truth in debates. Our results provide encouraging empirical evidence for the viability of aligning models with debate in the absence of ground truth.
The proliferation of hate speech (HS) on social media poses a serious threat to societal security. Automatic counter narrative (CN) generation, as an active strategy for HS intervention, has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Existing methods for automatically generating CNs mainly rely on re-training or fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) on human-curated CN corpora. Unfortunately, the annotation speed of CN corpora cannot keep up with the growth of HS targets, while generating specific and effective CNs for unseen targets remains a significant challenge for the model. To tackle this issue, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Zero-shot Generation (ReZG) to generate CNs with high-specificity for unseen targets. Specifically, we propose a multi-dimensional hierarchical retrieval method that integrates stance, semantics, and fitness, extending the retrieval metric from single dimension to multiple dimensions suitable for the knowledge that refutes HS. Then, we implement an energy-based constrained decoding mechanism that enables PLMs to use differentiable knowledge preservation, countering, and fluency constraint functions instead of in-target CNs as control signals for generation, thereby achieving zero-shot CN generation. With the above techniques, ReZG can integrate external knowledge flexibly and improve the specificity of CNs. Experimental results show that ReZG exhibits stronger generalization capabilities and outperforms strong baselines with significant improvements of 2.0%+ in the relevance and 4.5%+ in the countering success rate metrics.
Recent research has focused on using large language models (LLMs) to generate explanations for hate speech through fine-tuning or prompting. Despite the growing interest in this area, these generated explanations' effectiveness and potential limitations remain poorly understood. A key concern is that these explanations, generated by LLMs, may lead to erroneous judgments about the nature of flagged content by both users and content moderators. For instance, an LLM-generated explanation might inaccurately convince a content moderator that a benign piece of content is hateful. In light of this, we propose an analytical framework for examining hate speech explanations and conducted an extensive survey on evaluating such explanations. Specifically, we prompted GPT-3 to generate explanations for both hateful and non-hateful content, and a survey was conducted with 2,400 unique respondents to evaluate the generated explanations. Our findings reveal that (1) human evaluators rated the GPT-generated explanations as high quality in terms of linguistic fluency, informativeness, persuasiveness, and logical soundness, (2) the persuasive nature of these explanations, however, varied depending on the prompting strategy employed, and (3) this persuasiveness may result in incorrect judgments about the hatefulness of the content. Our study underscores the need for caution in applying LLM-generated explanations for content moderation. Code and results are available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/GPT3-HateEval.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of successfully performing many language processing tasks zero-shot (without training data). If zero-shot LLMs can also reliably classify and explain social phenomena like persuasiveness and political ideology, then LLMs could augment the Computational Social Science (CSS) pipeline in important ways. This work provides a road map for using LLMs as CSS tools. Towards this end, we contribute a set of prompting best practices and an extensive evaluation pipeline to measure the zero-shot performance of 13 language models on 25 representative English CSS benchmarks. On taxonomic labeling tasks (classification), LLMs fail to outperform the best fine-tuned models but still achieve fair levels of agreement with humans. On free-form coding tasks (generation), LLMs produce explanations that often exceed the quality of crowdworkers' gold references. We conclude that the performance of today's LLMs can augment the CSS research pipeline in two ways: (1) serving as zero-shot data annotators on human annotation teams, and (2) bootstrapping challenging creative generation tasks (e.g., explaining the underlying attributes of a text). In summary, LLMs are posed to meaningfully participate in social science analysis in partnership with humans.
Adopting contextually appropriate, audience-tailored linguistic styles is critical to the success of user-centric language generation systems (e.g., chatbots, computer-aided writing, dialog systems). While existing approaches demonstrate textual style transfer with large volumes of parallel or non-parallel data, we argue that grounding style on audience-independent external factors is innately limiting for two reasons. First, it is difficult to collect large volumes of audience-specific stylistic data. Second, some stylistic objectives (e.g., persuasiveness, memorability, empathy) are hard to define without audience feedback. In this paper, we propose the novel task of style infusion - infusing the stylistic preferences of audiences in pretrained language generation models. Since humans are better at pairwise comparisons than direct scoring - i.e., is Sample-A more persuasive/polite/empathic than Sample-B - we leverage limited pairwise human judgments to bootstrap a style analysis model and augment our seed set of judgments. We then infuse the learned textual style in a GPT-2 based text generator while balancing fluency and style adoption. With quantitative and qualitative assessments, we show that our infusion approach can generate compelling stylized examples with generic text prompts. The code and data are accessible at https://github.com/CrowdDynamicsLab/StyleInfusion.
The growing interest in developing corpora of persuasive texts has promoted applications in automated systems, e.g., debating and essay scoring systems; however, there is little prior work mining image persuasiveness from an argumentative perspective. To expand persuasiveness mining into a multi-modal realm, we present a multi-modal dataset, ImageArg, consisting of annotations of image persuasiveness in tweets. The annotations are based on a persuasion taxonomy we developed to explore image functionalities and the means of persuasion. We benchmark image persuasiveness tasks on ImageArg using widely-used multi-modal learning methods. The experimental results show that our dataset offers a useful resource for this rich and challenging topic, and there is ample room for modeling improvement.
State-of-the-art recommender system (RS) mostly rely on complex deep neural network (DNN) model structure, which makes it difficult to provide explanations along with RS decisions. Previous researchers have proved that providing explanations along with recommended items can help users make informed decisions and improve their trust towards the uninterpretable blackbox system. In model-agnostic explainable recommendation, system designers deploy a separate explanation model to take as input from the decision model, and generate explanations to meet the goal of persuasiveness. In this work, we explore the task of ranking textual rationales (supporting evidences) for model-agnostic explainable recommendation. Most of existing rationales ranking algorithms only utilize the rationale IDs and interaction matrices to build latent factor representations; and the semantic information within the textual rationales are not learned effectively. We argue that such design is suboptimal as the important semantic information within the textual rationales may be used to better profile user preferences and item features. Seeing this gap, we propose a model named Semantic-Enhanced Bayesian Personalized Explanation Ranking (SE-BPER) to effectively combine the interaction information and semantic information. SE-BPER first initializes the latent factor representations with contextualized embeddings generated by transformer model, then optimizes them with the interaction data. Extensive experiments show that such methodology improves the rationales ranking performance while simplifying the model training process (fewer hyperparameters and faster convergence). We conclude that the optimal way to combine semantic and interaction information remains an open question in the task of rationales ranking.
Normalization operations are essential for state-of-the-art neural networks and enable us to train a network from scratch with a large learning rate (LR). We attempt to explain the real effect of Batch Normalization (BN) from the perspective of variance transmission by investigating the relationship between BN and Weights Normalization (WN). In this work, we demonstrate that the problem of the shift of the average gradient will amplify the variance of every convolutional (conv) layer. We propose Parametric Weights Standardization (PWS), a fast and robust to mini-batch size module used for conv filters, to solve the shift of the average gradient. PWS can provide the speed-up of BN. Besides, it has less computation and does not change the output of a conv layer. PWS enables the network to converge fast without normalizing the outputs. This result enhances the persuasiveness of the shift of the average gradient and explains why BN works from the perspective of variance transmission. The code and appendix will be made available on https://github.com/lyxzzz/PWSConv.
Interpreting how persuasive language influences audiences has implications across many domains like advertising, argumentation, and propaganda. Persuasion relies on more than a message's content. Arranging the order of the message itself (i.e., ordering specific rhetorical strategies) also plays an important role. To examine how strategy orderings contribute to persuasiveness, we first utilize a Variational Autoencoder model to disentangle content and rhetorical strategies in textual requests from a large-scale loan request corpus. We then visualize interplay between content and strategy through an attentional LSTM that predicts the success of textual requests. We find that specific (orderings of) strategies interact uniquely with a request's content to impact success rate, and thus the persuasiveness of a request.