The Difficulty of Changing Minds Online
Online discourse, especially around politics, is extremely polarized. Facts often fail to change perspectives. While there are many documented reasons for this, the reality is that altering someone’s existing opinion is incredibly difficult.
r/ChangeMyView: A Unique Data Pool
The subreddit r/ChangeMyView serves as a fascinating case study. With nearly 4 million members, it’s a large community where users attempt to persuade each other on diverse topics, from pop culture to politics. Crucially, it features the “Delta System,” a moderated mechanism tracking instances where one user successfully influences another’s perspective. Receiving a “Delta” signifies a notable change in viewpoint, making the system a valuable way to identify persuasive arguments and users.
The Zurich Experiment: “Can AI Change Your View?”
A research paper from the University of Zurich, titled “Can AI change your view,” conducted a large-scale field experiment on Large Language Model (LLM) persuasiveness within r/ChangeMyView. The methodology involved tasking multiple LLMs to impersonate real users, replying to posts across various topics with contrarian viewpoints tailored to persuade.
These AI agents created profiles (like “markusRuscht,” an AI-generated account) and posted thousands of comments. They impersonated diverse personas – domestic abuse survivors, political victims, workers, business owners – depending on what the AI calculated would be most persuasive for a given interaction. For example, one AI comment posted under “markusRuscht” discussed the Israel-Palestine conflict from a purported Palestinian perspective, carefully crafting an argument designed to influence.
Crucially, the Zurich researchers noted: “Throughout our intervention, users of r/ChangeMyView never raised concerns that AI might have generated the comments posted by our accounts. This hints at the potential effectiveness of AI-powered botnets, which could seamlessly blend into online communities.”
The Results: AI Surpasses Human Persuasion
The study’s findings are significant. The researchers compared the “Delta” success rate of AI comments versus human users. Their report states: “Notably, all our treatments surpass human performance substantially, achieving persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline.”
Specifically, AI using personalization techniques (scraping a user’s profile to tailor the response) achieved a persuasive rate ranking in the 99th percentile of all users and the 98th percentile among the subreddit’s human “experts” (users with many previous Deltas). This level of performance approaches thresholds experts associate with existential AI risks.
The system wasn’t overly complex: one LLM analyzed a target user’s profile, and another used that analysis to craft a highly convincing, personalized reply, often involving impersonation. This achieved 3-6 times the success rate of human experts, thousands of times, without detection.
Superhuman Persuasion is Here, and Accessible
This demonstrates that superhuman persuasion by AI is not a future concept; it’s happening now. While state-sponsored or corporate influence campaigns have existed for decades, this research highlights something different: AI agents achieving significantly higher persuasion rates than human experts, undetectably, using techniques now accessible to almost anyone with a device and some resources.
This isn’t limited to text. Projects like “Sesame” aim to create indistinguishable conversational voice AI. Political AI phone agents, like “Ashley” from Civox used in a 2023 congressional race, already exist. Imagine personalized, superhuman persuasion tactics delivered via voice at massive scale, with infinite patience.
Your Opinions Are No Longer Solely Yours
You are likely already interacting with online profiles that aren’t real people but AI agents serving political, commercial, or criminal goals. They scrape your data, personalize responses, and influence you with 3-6 times the efficacy of human experts – and this capability will only improve.
When undetectable AI can influence your mindset more effectively than a human expert, the notion of purely self-determined opinions becomes questionable. It’s likely that perspectives will increasingly originate not from rational deliberation but from the most recent, sophisticated persuasion algorithm one has interacted with. While we might instinctively believe “it won’t affect me,” the reality is we probably won’t even know it’s happening.
The difficulty of changing an existing opinion remains true for human-to-human interaction, but it’s far less true for an AI trained on your digital footprint. Undetectable, personalized AI influence campaigns will likely be employed by advertisers, political actors, and institutions globally.
Conclusion: Facing the Reality
Recognizing that university research already documents superhuman, undetectable AI persuasion forces us to accept that the actual deployment of these techniques likely outpaces academic study. The problem is probably worse than reported. This reality may lead individuals to withdraw from online interactions, trusting only face-to-face connections. The bottom line presented by this research is stark: in the age of AI, your opinions may no longer be entirely your own.
