AI persuasion, AI manipulation

Or, have we always been reward hacking each other?

2015-10-05 — 2025-06-12

adversarial
AI safety
bounded compute
communicating
cooperation
culture
economics
faster pussycat
language
machine learning
mind
neural nets
NLP
security
technology
wonk
Figure 1

Placeholder, for future wondering about where our conversations with empathic machines will take us.

Humans are not amazing at rhetoric. Are machines better? Almost certainly. What will that mean for us?

1 Good metaphors for the persuasiveness of AI

Persuasive equal? Grooming a child? How potent is an AI at moving us, and what metaphor should that move us to consider its relationship to humanity?

2 Field experiments in persuasive AI

See This AI chatbot got conspiracy theorists to question their convictions (Costello, Pennycook, and Rand 2024).

This is pitched as AI-augmented de-radicalisation but you could change the goal and think of it as a test case for AI-augmented persuasion in general. Interestingly the AI doesn’t seem to need to resort to the traditional workarounds for human tribal reasoning such as deep canvassing, and the potential for scaling up individualised mass persuasion seems like it could become the dominant game in town, at least until the number of competing persuasive AI chatbots caused people to become inured to them.

See also Salvi et al. (2024).

Figure 2

3 Therapist in a box

TBD See also artifical intimacy.

4 Spamularity and the scam economy

See Spamularity for more on this.

5 The future wherein it is immoral to deny someone the exquisite companionship and attentive understanding of their own personal AI companion

See artificial intimacy for more on this.

6 Incoming

7 References

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Benkler, Faris, and Roberts. 2018. Network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics.
Bradshaw, and Howard. 2017. Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation.”
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Clark, and Clark. 2004. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.
———. 2011. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Philosophy of Mind.
Costello, Pennycook, and Rand. 2024. Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues with AI.” Science.
Dezfouli, Nock, and Dayan. 2020. Adversarial Vulnerabilities of Human Decision-Making.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
El-Sayed, Akbulut, McCroskery, et al. 2024. A Mechanism-Based Approach to Mitigating Harms from Persuasive Generative AI.”
Fang, Liu, Danry, et al. 2025. How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study.”
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Jecmen, Zhang, Liu, et al. 2020. Mitigating Manipulation in Peer Review via Randomized Reviewer Assignments.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
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Salvi, Ribeiro, Gallotti, et al. 2024. On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”
Shumailov, Shumaylov, Zhao, et al. 2023. The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget.”
Sperber, and Mercier. 2012. Reasoning as a Social Competence.” In Collective Wisdom.
Swartz, Marwick, and Larson. 2025. ScamGPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.
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Teeny, Siev, Briñol, et al. 2021. A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion.” Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Turkle. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.