[Aeyxen]

It's always amusing to watch people act shocked when LLMs beat average humans at persuasion. The actual headline here should be: 'A system trained on terabytes of successful human persuasion is better at persuasion than a random person on a crowdwork platform.' No mystery—just the mechanics of scale and exposure.

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.

[sebastiennight]

As a marketer with a couple of decades of experience I can tell you that there is way more financial incentive in "slightly persuading [consumer] to tilt towards [product] in their next purchase, and spend more and earlier" than there ever will be towards "next-level unbiased tutor in anything".

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.

[Aeyxen]

I understand your perspective as a marketer, but I think you're creating a false dichotomy. Yes, persuasion tech has stronger financial incentives, but that doesn't prevent beneficial applications from emerging simultaneously.

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.