On the Conversational Persuasiveness of GPT-4

A pre-registered randomized controlled trial of AI persuasion: in live text debates, GPT-4 given basic sociodemographic information about its opponent out-persuaded human debaters in ~64% of debates (81.2% higher odds of shifting the opponent's agreement), while without personalization it was not reliably more persuasive than humans. One of the most-covered results on AI persuasion and microtargeting. From Robert West's dlab; published in Nature Human Behaviour (2025).