Can AI Write Persuasive Propaganda?

Tuesday, April 11, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)
shelby grossman headshot with text reading tuesday april 11 seminar

Join the Cyber Policy Center, together with the Program on Democracy and the Internet for Can AI Write Persuasive Propaganda? with Shelby Grossman, moderated by Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory. This session is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June, hosted at the Cyber Policy Center with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Sessions are in-person and virtual, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance. 

Can large language models, a form of artificial intelligence, write persuasive propaganda? Research by Shelby Grossman, Josh A. Goldstein, Jason Chao, Alex Stamos and Michael Tomz utilized a pre-registered survey experiment to investigate the persuasiveness of news articles written by foreign propagandists, compared to content written by GPT-3 davinci (a large language model). They found that GPT-3 can write highly persuasive text. Further, they investigated whether a person fluent in English could improve propaganda persuasiveness: editing the prompt fed to GPT-3 or curating GPT-3's output made GPT-3 even more persuasive, and, under certain conditions, as persuasive as the original propaganda. Their findings suggest that if propagandists get access to GPT-3-like models, they could create convincing content with limited effort.