Most people can’t lie that smoothly, and most readers don’t check carefully, unless they are already an expert in the area.
Any kind of maths proof is particularly bad, they will look convincing and clear until you read them very carefully and see all the holes.
...and he's built his whole career in sales because of it.
He despises the existence of Google, because the last thing a pathological bullshitter wants is fact-checking in pockets!
It's taken me nearly 40 years to understand that anchoring statements in reality is just a completely meaningless endeavor for him. He does not care what is true. He cares only what is convincing.
I've been wondering for about a year now why I feel like I can tell LLM work from human work so much more easily than most people, when the only "tell" I can put my finger on is, "The hair stands up on the back of my neck," but this explains ALL of it.
Are there no rules in debates? There should be. You’re not allowed to punch someone in basketball so why should you be allowed to DOS people with bullshit in a debate?
They’ve been quietly open sourcing all of their arguments for like 20+ years.
This dataset is so large and good entirely because of speed reading and the current state of debate tournament competitive dynamics. Spreading might be objectively absurd to listeners but the effects of it are literally good for society.
The structure of the LLM answer is:
A is B; B exhibits property C.
The correct answer is:
A exhibits property C; B is the class of things with property C; therefore A is B.
There is a crucial difference between these two.
From https://ai.meta.com/research/cicero/ :
When playing 40 games against human players, CICERO achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game
EDIT: LLMs also aren't egocentric; they'll respond in the other person's style (grammar, tone, and perhaps maintain their "subtext" like assumptions), and they're less likely to omit important information that would be implicit to them but not the other person.
A simple case I have found, is looking for existing or creating new terms. If I have a series of concepts, which I have names for which have a nice linguistic pattern to emphasize their close relationship, except for one. I can describe the regularly named concepts, then ask for suggestions for the remaining concept.
The LLM pulls from virtually every topic with domain terminology, repurposable languages (Greek, Roman), words from fiction, all the way to creative construction of new words, tenses, etc to come up with great proposals in seconds.
I could imagine that crafting persuasive wording would be a similar challenge. Choosing the right words, right phrasing, etc. to carry as much positive connotation, implication of solidity, avoiding anything sounding challenging or controlling, etc. from all of human language and its huge space of emotional constraints and composites.
Very shallow but very wide reasoning/searching/balancing done in very little time.
And with an ability to avoid giving any unnecessary purchase for disagreement, being informed of all the myriad of typical and idiosyncratic ways people get hung up on failed persuasions. Whether in general or specific topic related.
LLM generated writing can be stereotypical.
But the more constraints put on requested material, the more their ability to construct really very original high quality, or even cleverly unique, prose in real time shines.
I called the first one “pre” since it “precedes” the others.
I called the last one “pro” since it “proceeds” from the others.
These are somewhat poetic/whimsical terms, for an abstract arrangement, but it’s nice to have good terms even for non-serious stuff.
I couldn’t come up with an equally concise term for the middle.
Claude came up with “per” as in “through” for the middle thing.
Couldn’t be more fitting.
But guess what? Now, finally, we can co-opt LLMs for things humans fumble: e.g., real-time conversational tutoring, adaptive negotiation agents, or even scalable personal 'bullshit detectors' as countermeasures. I hope conversation doesn't go into AI-Safeteyism and restricting LLMs and more about building stuff. Let's build, not block.
I think it would be difficult to truly convince me to answer differently in a test with 14 words where 30 would have enough space to actually convey an argument.
I would be very interested to see the test rerun while limiting LLM response length or encouraging long responses from humans.
It says they recruited participants from the US through Prolific and paid them £10.12 per hour, so probably more like the latter.
On the other hand, if you're content with your pre-existing predictions about what would happen, which I think is actually a reasonable position, there's no reason to read the paper.
Social media has turned into cancer. It'd be riveting to watch it turn into bots talking to other bots. Social media wouldn't go away, but I get the feeling people will engage more with real life again.
As the platforms see less growth and fewer real users, we might even see a return to protocols and open standards instead of monolithic walled gardens.
> ChatGPT, I choose YOU!
ChatGPT uses GISH GALLOP.
Let the real scientists settle things for us?
Alternatively, many people today let opinion media and/or their associated group allegiances settle what they believe. Much worse.
This creates a very poorly designed tool! A good tool should fail as loudly as possible, in that it alerts the user of the failure and does its best to specify the conditions that led to this. This isn't always possible, but if you look at physical engineers you'll see that this is where they spend a significant portion of their time. Even in software I'd argue we do a lot here, but also that it is easy to brush off (we all love those compiler messages... right?). Clearly right now LLMs are in a state where we don't know how to make their failures more visible, and honestly, that is okay. But what is not okay is to pretend that this is not current reality and pretend that there are no dangers or consequences that this presents. We dismiss this because we catch some obvious errors and over-generalize the error quality, but that just means we suffer from Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's REALLY hard to measure what you don't know. Importantly, we can't even begin to resolve these issues and build the tools we want (the ones we pretend these are!) if we ignore the reality of what we have. You cannot make things better if you are unwilling to recognize their limitations.
Everyone here is an engineer, researcher, or builder. This framework of thinking should be natural to us! We should also be able to understand that there's a huge difference between critiques and limitations and dismissing things. I'm an AI critic, but also very optimistic. I'm a researcher and spending my life working on this topic. It'd be insane to do such a thing if I thought it was a fruitless or evil effort. But it would be equally insane to pursue a topic with pure optimism. If I were to blind myself to limits and paint everything as a trivial to solve problem, I'd never be able to solve any of those problems. Ignoring or dismissing technical issues and limitations is the domain of the MBA managers, not engineers.
There's so much dirty subliminal or informal advertising that you can do with these things.
Oh well not being a plumber, electrician, or farmer... but our society's current productivity, technology, automation reduced our need for 80% of the population needing to be farmers to now 1.3% in the US. Can you imagine what the equivalent of 1 billion digital engineers unlocks in understanding and implementing robotics?
The "super tutor" stuff that is always mentioned as the utopian outcome (along with "cures for cancer") is, unsurprisingly, never something being worked on by the person or lab quoting these examples.
I guess anything goes in B2B settings, but there is a valid reason to be cautious about these advances when it comes to mass-market consumer-facing applications.
The "super tutor" isn't some distant fantasy - millions already use ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools daily for personalized learning. They're imperfect but genuinely helpful for programming, languages, math, and countless other topics.
Look at what happened with YouTube: millions of people transformed themselves into programmers, musicians, mechanics, and countless other professions through free video tutorials. Khan Academy revolutionized math education. Coursera and edX brought university courses to anyone with internet. This wasn't utopian thinking - it was practical technology solving real educational problems at scale.
What's different now is that LLMs enable the missing piece: personalization. The one-on-one adaptive experience that was previously limited to those who could afford human tutors at $50-100/hour is now available to anyone at negligible marginal cost.
Your skepticism about cancer applications too ignores the technological trajectory we've been on for decades. Just as YouTube and online platforms democratized education, technology has been steadily dismantling bottlenecks in medical research.
The human genome project initially cost $3 billion and took 13 years. Today you can sequence a genome for under $1,000 in days. This wasn't utopian thinking; it was technological progress following its natural course.
Think what LLMs will do here.
The test already incentivises being persuasive! If writing more words would do that, and the incentivised human persuaders don't write more words and the LLMs do, then I think it's fair to say that LLMs are more persuasive than incentivised human persuaders.
I always try to pick out as many tidbits as possible from papers that might be applicable in other situations. I think the main difference of word count may be overshadowing other insights that may be more relevant to longer form argumentation.
I don’t know if that would have the effect you want. And if you’re more likely have hallucinations at lower word counts, that matters for those who are scrupulous, but many people trying to convince you of something believe the ends justify the means, and that honesty or correspondence to reality are not necessary, just nice to have.
Asking chatbots for short answers can increase hallucinations, study finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43950684 - May 2025 (1 comment)
which is reporting on this post:
Good answers not necessarily factual answers: analysis of hallucination in LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43950678 - May 2025 (1 comment)
I do think its distinctly possible that LLMs will be much less convincing due to increased hallucinations at a low word count. I also think that may have less of an effect for dishonest suggestions. Simply stating a lie confidently is relatively effective.
I would prefer advising humans to increase length rather than restricting LLMs because of the cited effects.
For the record I always thought Kurzweil and that crowd was clowns, now I think I was the wrong one
Is GPT-4xyz better than the last one? I'm sure some benchmark numbers say that. But the number of applications where occasional hallucinations don't matter is very small, and where it matters nothing really changed. Companies are trying to use it for customer support but that predictably turned out to be a legal risk. Klarna went all-in on AI and regrets it now.
Some media are talking about Microsoft writing 30% of their new code with AI, but what Nadella actually said is less impressive: "maybe 20-30% of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software". Which, coincidentally, is the ratio of code that can be autocompleted by an IDE without LLM, according to Jetbrains.
I have yet to see any evidence that anything will change way faster than it ever has, aside from the readiness of many younger people to use it in everyday life for things it really shouldn't be used.
I tend to think that it’ll have an optimistic ending. The key to solving most political problems is eliminating scarcity.
Give it a decade though and people won't think twice about it, though I do hope we'd still do that kind of thing ourselves
Brevity is really important in a debate. Especially in the modern day where someone might turn you into a chad vs soyjack meme.
And if anything, what happens before the debate is more important than what happens during it. Our dear president showed us you can become the leader of the free world using playground insults and ad-libbed speeches if you choose the right demographics and look good in a suit.
Yup to your last sentence. It irritated me how off-topic his responses were.
I've spent much of my life learning to tell when people are making things up, but telling when they genuinely believe something that's completely wrong is a very different skill.
It's especially frustrating when they change the narrative of a real story about something where there were multiple witnesses (e.g., my mom and my siblings), then come to believe the narrative, and then accuse us of conspiring to gaslight them.
On the one hand, I get why that would be disorienting and scary, to have a whole group of people telling you you're wrong about something you're sure you remember. On the other hand...karma?
I would advise the opposite to humans, as your advice is playing to the strengths of AI/LLMs and away from the strengths of humans versus AI/LLMs.
The given study does not show any strength of humans over LLMs. Both goal metrics (truthful and deceptive) are better for LLMs than humans. If you are misinterpreting my advice as general advice for people not under the study's conditions, I would want to see the results of the proposed rerun before suggesting that.
However, if length of text is legitimately convincing regardless of content, I don't know why humans should avoid using that. If LLMs end up more convincing to humans than other humans simply because humans are too prideful to make their arguments longer, that seems like the worst possible future.
People aren’t too proud to make long arguments, they just take more time and effort to make for humans, and so historically, humans subconsciously consider longer arguments as more intellectually rigorous whether they are or not, and so length of a written piece is used as a kind of lazy heuristic corresponding with quality. When we're comparing the output of humans to that of other humans, this kind of approach may work to a certain extent, but AI/LLMs seem to be better at writing long pieces of text upon demand than humans. That humans find the LLM output more convincing if it is longer is not surprising to me, but I’ll agree with you that it isn’t a good sign either. The metric has become a target.
This is such an example of getting what you incentivize, not what matters.
When Busta makes more intelligible listening than the arguments of your debate team, you know debate is broken.
[0]: Start 2 minutes in, give it a try: https://youtu.be/W7FfCJb8JZQ?feature=shared&t=120
He makes an intriguing point.
What is the point of that? They're incomprehensible. (For those who haven't watched it: the video just shows people talking very fast, it doesn't explain why, kind of implies it's somehow good or impressive.)
I mean there is probably not a specific rule I could point to that a high school athlete couldn't ride a bike or a motorcycle in a 400m track run either.
There is probably not a specific rule that you can't shoot the shot put out of a canon either.
I would just assume the judges have the slightest bit of common sense.
There most definitely is such a rule, and there most definitely are people who have tried to do that - and been the cause of the original rule wording ; and others who still have tried to do so by "creatively interpreting" said rule.
Have you met humans?
That’s a queue, not a stack. The LLM response was correct.
Again/stepping back: what is the point of winning a debate tournament like this, or that values this 'debate'?
Generally yes, although a good team will slow down and speak more or less like normal people if they have a so-called "lay judge" who wouldn't be able to understand them going at full speed.
> but seriously value it in scoring?
You don't really get "scored" on how fast you speak (there's no points system), but, as I mentioned, there are strategic reasons to speak quickly.
For instance, a time-honored strategy is to spew out a huge number of roughly-orthogonal arguments (e.g. "my opponent's policy failed to support the resolution we are debating this tournament, and thus shouldn't win for procedural reasons." "my opponent's policy would destabilize the Kashmir conflict and thus lead to global thermonuclear war." "my opponent's policy would preclude this alternative policy I am now presenting, and my policy is better, ergo my opponent's policy is bad in terms of opportunity cost." and so on), and then circle back later in the debate and further develop any arguments your opponent failed to adequately address (perhaps because they can't speak as fast as you).
An interesting counter-example from when I was actively debating is that at least one team on the national circuit was arguing (somewhat successfully, if I remember right) that speaking fast was a reason to actively vote against a team. The rough gist of the argument was something along the lines that being trained to speak quickly (and have the huge amount of prep-work required to really get value out of the skill) was something really only accessible to affluent/"privileged" kids (although that latter term was a couple years away from entering the common lexicon, I think), and then connecting it back to the central topic of that debate season so as to undermine whatever position the other team had originally presented (but, of course, pointing out that the impact of their argument was occurring in the real world, right now, contra the assumed fiction of their opponent's policy proposal or whatever, and thus a more urgent reason to vote for them).
> what is the point of winning a debate tournament like this, or that values this 'debate'?
For the most part, it's a fun and challenging game for the people involved, the same reason people play chess or go bowling. There's a lot of work and creativity that goes into preparing for a tournament, and the debate rounds themselves reward being able to think quickly on your feet and work well with your debate partner. You get a lot of practice at speaking in public, to a hostile audience no less, which is imo an incredibly valuable life skill (and can be very exciting).