Francesco Salvi

🌱✨ Life update: I just started my PhD at Princeton University!

I will be supervised by @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social and affiliated with Princeton CITP.

It's only been a month, but the energy feels amazing —very grateful for such a welcoming community. Excited for what’s ahead! 🚀

Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use.

In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776

✍️ I wrote a short piece for the #SPSPblog about our work on AI persuasion (w/ @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social @ricgallotti.bsky.social Robert West).

Read it at: t.co/MipJKWbb1h.

Thanks @andyluttrell.bsky.social @prpietromonaco.bsky.social @spspnews.bsky.social for your invitation and feedback!

🚨YouTube is a key source of health info, but it’s also rife with dangerous myths on opioid use disorder (OUD), a leading cause of death in the U.S.

To understand the scale of such misinformation, our #EMNLP2025 paper introduces MythTriage, a scalable system to detect OUD myth🧵

EPFL, ETH Zurich & CSCS just released Apertus, Switzerland’s first fully open-source large language model.
Trained on 15T tokens in 1,000+ languages, it’s built for transparency, responsibility & the public good.

Read more: actu.epfl.ch/news/apertus...

Another paper showing AI (Claude 3.5) is more persuasive than the average human, even when the humans had financial incentives

In this case, either AI or humans (paid if they were persuasive) tried to convince quiz takers (paid for accuracy) to pick either right or wrong answers on a quiz.

NLP 4 Democracy - COLM 2025

📣 Super excited to organize the first workshop on ✨NLP for Democracy✨ at COLM @colmweb.org!!

Check out our website: sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e...

Call for submissions (extended abstracts) due June 19, 11:59pm AoE

#COLM2025 #LLMs #NLP #NLProc #ComputationalSocialScience

This is figure 1, which shows an overview of the experimental design.

A study in Nature Human Behaviour finds that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, can be more persuasive than humans 64% of the time in online debates when adapting their arguments based on personalised information about their opponents. go.nature.com/4j9ibyE 🧪

AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find Study author warns of implications for elections and says ‘malicious actors’ are probably using LLM tools already Artificial intelligence can do just as well as humans, if not better, when it comes to persuading others in a debate, and not just because it cannot shout, a study has found. Experts say the results are concerning, not least as it has potential implications for election integrity. Continue reading...

AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do OpenAI’s GPT-4 is much better at getting people to accept its point of view during an argument than humans are—but there’s a catch.

Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse.

Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Incentivized Human Persuaders We directly compare the persuasion capabilities of a frontier large language model (LLM; Claude Sonnet 3.5) against incentivized human persuaders in an interactive, real-time conversational quiz setti...

I also have another preprint out showing similar results on Claude Sonnet 3.5 in interactive quizzes with highly incentivised humans, both in truthful and deceptive persuasion. More on this at: arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662

Francesco Salvi on X: "📢🚨Excited to share our new pre-print: “On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial”, with @manoelribeiro, @ricgallotti, and @cervisiarius. https://t.co/wNRMFtgCrN A thread 🧵: https://t.co/BKNbnI8avV" / X 📢🚨Excited to share our new pre-print: “On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial”, with @manoelribeiro, @ricgallotti, and @cervisiarius. https://t.co/wNRMFtgCrN A thread 🧵: https://t.co/BKNbnI8avV

If you're interested in knowing more, you can find a more detailed breakdown on our methodology and results at: x.com/fraslv/statu...

Or read the full paper at nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks to my amazing coauthors @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social @ricgallotti.bsky.social Robert West

That raises urgent questions about possible misuse in political propaganda, misinformation, and election interference.

Platforms and regulators should seriously consider these risks and step up in our discussion about guardrails, transparency, and accountability.

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 - Nature Human Behaviour Salvi et al. find that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when given basic sociodemographic data. With personalization, GPT-4 had 81.2% higher odds of post-debate agreement than humans.

📢📜 Excited to share that our paper "On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4" has been published in Nature Human Behaviour!

🤖 Key takeaway: LLMs can already reach superhuman persuasiveness, especially when given access to personalized information

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

AI is more persuasive than people in online debates When given information about its human opponents, the large language model GPT-4 was able to make particularly convincing arguments.

“Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they’re going to start using them. I find it both fascinating and terrifying,” says @frasalvi.bsky.social

Read more on persuasive chatbots in my rather terrifying piece for @nature.com 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If your NSF grant has been terminated, please, please report it here:

airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

Collecting this information is supremely helpful to organize and facilitate a response.

Open positions and projects ### Open semester and Master's projects If you're an AU student looking for a semester project, a Bachelor project, or an MS thesis project, please refer to [this list](projects). ### Prospective PhD ...

I am recruiting 2 PhD students for Fall'25 @csaudk.bsky.social to work on bleeding-edge topics in #NLProc #LLMs #AIAgents (e.g. LLM reasoning, knowledge-seeking agents, and more).

Details: www.cs.au.dk/~clan/openings
Deadline: May 1, 2025

Please boost!

cc: @aicentre.dk @wikiresearch.bsky.social

🚨 #IC2S2’25 Call for Abstract deadline is just around the corner—Feb 24, 2025
Submit your abstract now: www.ic2s2-2025.org/submit-abstr... and join us in Norrköping, Sweden.
Tutorials announcement coming soon!

New tool to estimate the level of participation in collective action expressed in natural language.
Applied to social media, it can produce large-scale and granular estimates of behavior change wrt collective action.
github.com/ariannap13/e...
@nerdsitu.bsky.social @itu.dk @carlsbergfondet.dk

CS2Italy Join the premier CS2 Italy Conference, a pivotal event for computational social scientists in Italy and internationally. Scheduled for 2025, this conference will feature interdisciplinary collaboratio...

Just arrived in Trento for cs2italy.org, the first Italian conference on CSS: excited to see the Italian community gathering together!

🤖 I'll be presenting our work on AI persuasion [1] tomorrow morning at 11:15 to session 1A — come say hello!

[1] arxiv.org/abs/2403.14380

Lies, Damned Lies, and Distributional Language Statistics: Persuasion and Deception with Large Language Models Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about pot...

How effective are LLMs are persuading and deceiving people? In a new preprint we review different theoretical risks of LLM persuasion; empirical work measuring how persuasive LLMs currently are; and proposals to mitigate these risks. 🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2412.17128

Before you all delete your accounts on X, you should consider deleting content but "donating" them to science. Many institutions, such as @gesis-dataservices.bsky.social might use them to scrape more effectively than via burner accounts.

Appointment of EPFL professors The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of professors at EPFL.

What do Samy Bengio, Michael Bronstein (@mmbronstein.bsky.social), and Annie Hartely have in common, apart from being brilliant scientists?
They are now professors at EPFL. Welcome!!! 🤗🚀

actu.epfl.ch/news/appoint...

GPT-4 is able to pass on average 91.7% of EPFL core courses, raising significant concerns about the vulnerability of higher education to AI assistants.

Timely large-scale study mobilising an army of scholars across EPFL, including my small contribution to the evaluation efforts ✍️

More below ⬇️

New @acm-cscw.bsky.social paper, new content moderation paradigm.

Post Guidance lets moderators prevent rule-breaking by triggering interventions as users write posts!

We implemented PG on Reddit and tested it in a massive field experiment (n=97k). It became a feature!

arxiv.org/abs/2411.16814

Utterly impressive how such a complex intervention was deployed in real-time with a latency of just 3s.

The technical effort behind implementing this with a latency of 3s (and, more broadly, your appendix B) is utterly impressive

Absolutely amazing field experiment showing how LLMs can effectively decrease reported polarization by re-ranking social feeds

Would love to be added, if there's still space! 🦋

I'd love to be added if there's still space!