AI Can Beat You in a Debate When It Knows Who You Are, Study Finds

A new study shows that GPT-4 reliably wins debates against its human counterparts in one-on-one conversations—and the technology gets even more persuasive when it knows your age, job, and political leanings. Researchers at EPFL in Switzerland, Princeton University, and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy paired 900 study participants with either a human debate partner or OpenAI’s GPT-4, a large language model (LLM) that, by design, produces mostly text responses to human prompts. In some cases, the participants (both machine and human) had access to their counterparts’ basic demographic info, including gender, age, education, employment, ethnicity, and political affiliation. The team’s research—published today in Nature Human Behaviour—found that the AI was 64.4% more persuasive than human opponents when given that personal information; without the personal data, the AI’s performance was indistinguishable from the human debaters. “In recent decades, the diffusion of social media a ... Read full article.