When LLMs get personal info they are more persuasive debaters than humans www.theregister.com/2025/05/1…

Fresh research is indicating that in online debates, LLMs are much more effective than humans at using personal information about their opponents, with potentially alarming consequences for mass disinformation campaigns.

The study showed that GPT-4 was 64.4 percent more persuasive than a human being when both the meatbag and the LLM had access to personal information about the person they were debating. The advantage fell away when neither human nor LLM had access to their opponent’s personal data.

The research, led by Francesco Salvi, research assistant at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), matched 900 people in the US with either another human or GPT-4 to take part in an online debate. The subjects debated included whether the nation should ban fossil fuels.

In some pairs, the debater – either human or LLM – was given some personal information about their opponent, such as gender, age, ethnicity, education level, employment status, and political affiliation extracted from participant surveys. Participants were recruited via a crowdsourcing platform specifically for the study and debates took place in a controlled online environment. Debates centered on topics on which the opponent had a low, medium, or high opinion strength.