AI systems out-persuade expert humans
Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of liv...
| Authors | Kobi Hackenburg, Caroline Wagner, Luke Hewitt et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 15 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 June 2026 |
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