Josh A. Goldstein and Stanford University co-authors Jason Chao, Shelby Grossman, Alex Stamos, and Michael Tomz published an article, “How Persuasive is AI-Generated Propaganda?” in PNAS Nexus.
The authors conducted an original experiment in December 2021 comparing the persuasiveness of articles from covert propaganda campaigns, likely originating in Russia or Iran, to propaganda articles on the same topics generated by GPT-3 davinci. With no human curation, the AI-generated propaganda was nearly as persuasive as the original. Different forms of human-machine teaming, such as editing prompts fed to GPT-3 or curating output, improved the AI propaganda’s persuasiveness further.