A new EPFL study has demonstrated the persuasive power of large language models, finding that participants debating GPT-4 with access to their personal information were far more likely to change their opinion compared to those who debated humans.
"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." That's the caption to a famous 1990s cartoon showing a large dog with his paw on a computer keyboard. Fast forward 30 years, replace "dog" with "AI" and this sentiment was a key motivation behind a new study to quantify the persuasive power of today's large language models (LLMs).
"You can think of all sorts of scenarios where you're interacting with a language model although you don't know it, and this is a fear that people have—on the internet are you talking to a dog or a chatbot or a real human?" asked Associate Professor Robert West, head of the Data Science Lab in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences. "The danger is superhuman like chatbots that create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online."
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