Scaling language model size yields diminishing returns for single-message political persuasion.

ABSTRACT: Large language models can now generate political messages as persuasive as those written by humans, raising concerns about how far this persuasiveness may continue to increase with model size. Here, we generate 720 persuasive messages on 10 US political issues from 24 language models spanning several orders of magnitude in size. We then deploy these messages in a large-scale randomized survey experiment (N = 25,982) to estimate the persuasive capability of each model. Our findings are twofold. First, we find evidence that model persuasiveness is characterized by sharply diminishing returns, such that current frontier models are only slightly more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more. Second, we find that the association between language model size

SUBMITTER: Hackenburg K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11912392 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature