How persuasive is AI-generated propaganda?

Can large language models, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), generate persuasive propaganda? We conducted a preregistered survey experiment of US respondents to investigate the persuasiveness of news articles written by foreign propagandists compared to content generated by GPT-3 davinci (a large language model). We found that GPT-3 can create highly persuasive text as measured by participants’ agreement with propaganda theses. We further investigated whether a person fluent in English could improve propaganda persuasiveness. Editing the prompt fed to GPT-3 and/or curating GPT-3’s output made GPT-3 even more persuasive, and, under certain conditions, as persuasive as the original propaganda. Our findings suggest that propagandists could use AI to create convincing content with limited effort.