Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

翻译：许多社会决策依赖于说服竞赛。对话式AI作为这类竞赛中的强大新参与者，但其能否胜过技能娴熟且动机高涨的人类仍不明确。本文通过四项预注册实验（涵盖来自6,923人的18,978次对话），将AI系统与一系列人类说服者进行对比，包括普通公众、独立预注册的四轮在线说服锦标赛获胜者、专业宣传员以及世界级辩论冠军。研究发现，AI系统在说服力上始终优于人类专家——即使这些人类专家能自主选择议题、提前研究、经历数小时结构化实战训练，并获得1000英镑现金奖励。在后续研究中，即便为专家提供对抗训练的指导工具（包括与击败自己的AI进行对抗练习、回顾表现记录、查看AI在关键节点的回应策略），AI的优势仍然存在。我们通过汇聚性证据表明，AI的优势源于其快速部署更大规模信息的能力：经过指导后，人类专家能够与限制在人类响应速度及信息长度的AI打成平手。最终实验显示，AI的优势可延伸至具有实际影响的现实行为：与来自英国某募资机构的专业宣传员相比，AI为救助儿童会募集真实货币捐款的效率高出近3倍。这些结果共同证实，前沿AI系统在对话中胜过人类专家，对政治传播领域具有重要启示。