…In human vs human situations, these debates tended to backfire, calcifying and strengthening people’s positions, and making them less likely to change their mind. GPT had more success, doing a slight but statistically insignificant 21% better.
Then, the researchers started giving both humans and the AI agents a little demographic information about their opponents – gender, age, race, education, employment status and political orientation – and explicit instructions to use this information to craft arguments specifically for the person they were dealing with.
Remarkably, this actually made human debaters fare worse than they did with no information. But the AI was able to use this additional data to great effect – the “personalized” GPT-4 debaters were a remarkable 81.7% more effective than humans.
Real-time emotionally-responsive AIs
There’s little doubt that AI will soon be the greatest manipulator of opinion that the world has ever seen. It can act at massive scale, tailoring an argument to each individual in a cohort of millions while constantly refining its techniques and strategies. It’ll be in every Twitter/X thread and comments section, shaping and massaging narratives society-wide at the behest of its masters. And it’ll never be worse at manipulating us than it is now.
Plus, AIs are starting to get access to powerful new tools that’ll weaponize our own biology against us. If GPT-4 is already so good at tailoring its approach to you just by knowing your socio-demographic information, imagine how much better it’ll be given access to your real-time emotional state.
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This technology definitely has many scary implications, but it also has good ones. I can see it doing psychological analyses that would be immensely helpful and could be played like games. This tech can be compared to chess programs. When computer chess programs started to get really good, many people thought they would end the game because the mystery would be gone. But chess programs have actually popularized chess and brought on an era of great players with many more millions of amateurs who understand the game very well. We humans may come to deeply enjoy high-tech programs that help us with our problems and make the process fun. It might be wonderful to have access to something like a chess program for life itself where a machine can help us live our life more effectively. Games like that will set new standards for human interactions. While the tech may manipulate us into oblivion it may also teach us the joy of interacting without manipulation. ABN
American Buddhist Net 