Reacción a "In online debates, GPT-4 can be more persuasive than humans"

This research paper focuses on the ability of GPT-4 to debate and persuade in conversations on topics of different levels of controversy. The authors conclude, through a study of 900 users with diverse socio-demographic profiles (varying gender, age, ethnicity, education level and political affiliation), that GPT-4 exhibits abilities equal or superior to humans to persuade on the topics being debated. 

Additionally, the results suggest that if the AI model has access to personal information about the human with whom it converses, then it is able to leverage that knowledge to improve its persuasive skills.  

Although the research is conducted in a restricted environment (discussions limited to a certain time and structure) and with a biased sample population (mainly Americans and regular users of a certain experimentation platform), the practical implications could be important. For example, for the purposes of exploiting AIs to persuade the population for lawful purposes (safe driving or waste recycling) or unlawful purposes (manipulation of the citizenry for political purposes). 

This journey of AIs as ‘agents of persuasion’ will therefore need to be monitored in the short, medium and long term from an ethical and risk mitigation perspective.  

On the other hand, in a real-world environment, the feasibility of accessing certain personal data (e.g. ethnicity or political affiliation) may be questionable. To test these results and analyse their transferability to other settings, it would also be necessary to extend the experimentation with conversations in other languages (e.g. Spanish) and humans from other, more diverse geographical backgrounds.