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How persuasive are present-day AI systems?

Unfortunately, it is surprisingly difficult to know where AI capabilities in persuasion are today (September 2026), or even three months ago. Benchmarking AI capabilities well is always hard, but I think humanity's understanding of AI's persuasive abilities is substantially worse than our understanding of, say, AI cybersecurity or math abilities. Still, this question is worth addressing.

What do I mean by “persuasion, broadly construed?” Here I’m thinking less of a single crisply defined skill, but a loose family of abilities centered on “directed social influence and manipulation”: shifting someone's beliefs, preferences, emotional states, attention, or identity, in order to get them to do what you want. For example, I include not just attempts to convince a specific person of specific beliefs in dialogue, but also mass persuasion, preference shaping, attention hijacking, attempts to create or reshape common knowledge, relationship-building, discovery of novel ideologies or religions, and manipulation of social reality to make certain topics appealing or aversive to consider. I also explicitly include deception. (See Appendix A for a more extended definition and explanation of scoping choices).

So with [...]

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Outline:

(03:11) Evidence in favor of AIs being as or more persuasive than median professional humans

(09:21) Real-world evidence of model outperformance

(11:07) Evidence against AIs being as persuasive as median professional humans

(14:33) Can we rule out large-scale covert persuasion success?

(19:10) Conclusion and Future Work

(20:45) Appendix A: Scoping and Definitions of Persuasion

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 5th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CzmMvnPy7YdSRucDH/current-ais-out-persuade-professionals-in-lab-settings-but

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“Current AIs out-persuade professionals in lab settings but (probably) not in the world” by Linch

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Current AIs out-persuade professionals in lab settings but (probably) not in the world” by Linch