MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 62.26.00
Agency (Persuasive capabilities)
Description
"GPAI systems can produce outputs (such as natural language text, audio, or video) that convince their users of incorrect information. This can happen through personalized persuasion in dialogue, or the mass-production of mis- leading information that is then disseminated over the internet. The persuasive capabilities of GPAI models can sometimes scale with model size or capability [32, 172]. Persuasive models could have larger societal implications by being misused to generate convincing but manipulative or untruthful content."
From Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Cyber offence
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Autonomous replication and adaptation
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Manipulation
- Subagents
- AI Influence