Persuasion, Not Much New: Chat Bots' Effectiveness Tied to Insight about Audience, Of Course

The public relations sector and other industries in the business of persuasion will need to modify their tools. Not overhaul the fundamentals. 

Research, as published in Nature Human Behavior, found that moving the needle on points of view via chat bots is more effective if information about who's in the loop is programmed into the technology. Of course, as everyone in communications, as well as politicos and trial lawyers, knows: That circles back to the concept of understanding the details about your audience. Every interaction, no matter the medium, has to be targeted at the audience. 

A summary of the findings in the MIT Technology Review puts it this way:

"A multi-university team of researchers found that OpenAI’s GPT-4 was significantly more persuasive than humans when it was given the ability to adapt its arguments using personal information about whoever it was debating."

No surprise, this opens the door to extreme misuse. Be it a political campaign or a marketing launch of a new product or service, chat bots embedded with the right audience intel can have profound influence. Increasingly society is turning to chat bots for what it used to derive from search engines. Some of my clients only use OpenAI's ChatGPT for everything from business needs to briefings about health matters. 

The door is also opened to new kinds of value created by integrating chat bots into a service. For instance, with rising expenses large law firms are being advised to broaden their focus beyond practicing law to other kinds of profit centers. Dentons has already done that with advisory services. 

Since what goes on in the court of public opinion can influence legal matters major players such as Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden and Paul Weiss can package "persuasion" promotions via chat bots as a stand-alone or an add-on. A target market could be lobbyists for a particular regulation or bit of legislation. Another one could be litigation funders. A third could be the heavily regulated financial sector. 

In coaching I help professionals change lanes in their traditional modes of messaging. 

Thrown off your game, maybe the first time since you started working? You made all the right moves and then the world moved in another direction.

Intuitive Coaching. Special expertise with transitions, reskilling and aging. Psychic/tarot readings, upon request. Complimentary consultation with Jane Genova (Text 203-468-8579, janegenova374@gmail.com). Yes, test out the chemistry. There’s no risk.