Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues

The emergence of transformer models that leverage deep learning and web-scale corpora has made it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle many higher-order cognitive tasks, with critical implications for industry, government, and labor markets in the US and globally. Here, we investigate whether the currently most powerful, openly-available AI model – GPT-3 – is capable of influencing the beliefs of humans, a social behavior recently seen as a unique purview of other humans. Across three preregistered experiments featuring diverse samples of Americans (total N=4,836), we find consistent evidence that messages generated by AI are persuasive across a number of policy issues, including an assault weapon ban, a carbon tax, and a paid parental-leave program. Further, AI-generated messages were as persuasive as messages crafted by lay humans. Compared to the human authors, participants rated the author of AI messages as being more factual and logical, but less angry, unique, and less likely to use story-telling. Our results show the current generation of large language models can persuade humans, even on polarized policy issues. This work raises important implications for regulating AI applications in political contexts, to counter its potential use in misinformation campaigns and other deceptive political activities.