phd candidate @oiioxford @uniofoxford | research scientist @AISecurityInst | AI, social data science, persuasion with language models
Oxford
Joined September 2018
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New w/ @AISecurityInst & @UniofOxford:
Frontier AI can now out-persuade expert humans in conversation - incl. world-champ debaters and professional canvassers.
This held even when humans chose their topics, prepared in advance, and competed for £1,000 prizes 🧵
True re: attention! And glad Anthropic is starting to share this data. But I struggle to interpret these numbers:
-IIUC, they're reporting share of conversations, not users. If a small % of heavy users have lots of other conversations (e.g. about coding), which seems plausible to me, then 0.51% of convos could mask a much higher share of users (the election-relevant quantity) asking about the election
-6 weeks before a midterm is still before most voters tune in
Hope a fuller release has per-user data across the full cycle!
The attention constraint on AI persuasion is fundamental, as we argued in this chapter preprints.apsanet.org/engage…
Just 0.51% of Claude conversations are about elections or voting; at most 0.01% about who to vote for
Kobi Hackenburg retweeted
🚨Published in @Nature: We show how AI can simulate human behavior to predict experimental results as accurately as experts
Our work has many implications for AI safety. For example, simulators can be used to aid harmful manipulation, and current safeguards do not prevent this🧵
Kobi Hackenburg retweeted
🚨🚨New paper in @Nature with @AshuAshok, @lukebeehewitt & @ghezae_isaias 🚨🚨
Can LLMs predict results of social science experiments?
Across 70 preregistered studies, we find strong correspondence (r=.85) between LLM-predicted and observed effects.
doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-1… 🧵
Kobi Hackenburg retweeted
See for exciting new results on AI “super-persuasion” 👇
Excellent work by all involved, especially Kobi, who I increasingly suspect is an ensemble of humans/aliens living inside a human meat suit such is his magnificent output.
New w/ @AISecurityInst & @UniofOxford:
Frontier AI can now out-persuade expert humans in conversation - incl. world-champ debaters and professional canvassers.
This held even when humans chose their topics, prepared in advance, and competed for £1,000 prizes 🧵
Regardless of these uncertainties, we hope this work can be a starting place for discussion (and further research!) on the impacts these persuasive systems could have on society in the near future
This was a big effort - huge thanks to my collaborators @acarolinewagner @lukebeehewitt @Ben_Tappin @hannahrosekirk @HelenMargetts @summerfieldlab, and to many at @AISecurityInst for making it possible 🙏
Comments and feedback welcome!
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475
